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Quantifying the Value of Coastal Ecosystems

 

using Earth Observation, field data and AI to enable sustainable coastal development and power conservation at scale

 

 

Ocean Ledger (2)
OUR solution

A scalable approach to coastal natural capital accounting

Cloud-based software that provides insights on ecosystem health and value which can enable targeted investment, management and robust impact reporting

  • Historical, baseline, ongoing monitoring
  • 7x faster and 11x cheaper than present direct observation
  • Ridge to reef ecosystem coverage
  • UN SEEA Compliant
Our Capabilities

Project Scoping 

Robustly measure proximity to crucial habitats, factoring in ecosystem value into planning & development process 

Baseline Analysis

Establish a robust baseline for future project revenue or impact assessment

Ongoing Monitoring

Track ecosystem extent, condition and services with standardised year-on-year change

Reporting

Translate these analytics into relevant metrics and insights for internal and external reporting  

whY Ocean ledger
 

Confident decision-making

Large-scale investment and intervention require robust insights on ecosystem extent, health & value

  • Global estimates are inaccurate
  • No standardised framework
  • Direct-sampling is unscalable
  • LiDAR alone is too expensive
Allen Coral Atlas
1 Map of seagrass extent in Seychelles using Allen Coral Atlas Tool. Showing highly underestimated seagrass extent when scaled down from global to national or local scale.
Ocean Data Viewer
2 Same map but using Ocean Data Viewer analysis, showing highly overestimated seagrass extent.
ours
3 Ocean Ledger provides the most accurate output, for confident, robust decision-making.
why protect coastal ecosystems

The business case is clear

$36B

Global annual contribution from coral reef-dependent tourism

35x

More carbon stored by seagrass than tropical rainforest

$82B

Saved in annual flood-related costs due to mangroves

Underpinned by ecosystem services at every level

 Industry: Fishing, tourism, coastal infrastructure

 Community: Food, income, flood protection

 Planetary: Carbon sequestration, oxygen supplier

GRID-ARENDAL_2020_-_Seascapes

Our work in the Seychelles

The first time remote sensing was used to establish nationally-determined contributions.

Alongside the Seychelles Conservation & Climate Adaptation Trust, we mapped and assessed the Seychelles' national blue carbon seagrass stock to enable them to deliver on their commitment to process their seagrass by 2030.

Let us help you with your next project

Questions?

How does our technology work?

We leverage Google Earth Engine's geospatial platform and supercharge it with machine learning and scientific know-how to validate, calibrate and generate uncertainties for our coastal ecosystem accounting output.  

The platform enables us to take satellite 'mosaics' created from thousands of images and scale them up to the required scale - sub-national or national.

Our approach is highly modular, so we can take our core components to scale across space and time, and increase or decrease the resolution as needed.

Who can leverage Ocean Ledger's technology?

As an impact-led business we are committed to helping both the public and private sector deliver on sustainability commitments and reduce negative impact on coastal ecosystems. Within the public sector we'll join consortiums for large government contracts or environmental agencies. Within the private sector, any industry that has direct interaction with the coast. That includes coastal developers, tourism operators, dredging, aquaculture, oil refineries, wastewater treatment,  and offshore wind developers, that want to measure proximity and impact on coastal ecosystems for Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) and establish science-based targets for sustainability commitments. 

How are we engaging with the scientific and conservation community?

Our technology is by no means a replacement for conservation work - it is an enabler for targeted, conservation projects whose positive impact on the environment can be recorded, surfaced and communicated to the rest of the world. 

Our algorithm is only as good as the field data, or ground-truth data, we put into it. That means we need to collaborate with conservation groups and companies who are developing innovative solutions for collecting ground-truth data for marine environment. 

A clear synergy exists between those who collect field data and our remote-sensing technique:

1) Their data can help improve our accuracies in regions they have mapped but we haven't.

2) Our data can reduce the time and cost for their data acquisition in areas they have not mapped by understanding where coastal ecosystems are and which ones are high-risk or high-value. 

Which regions can we operate in?

Thanks to global access to satellite data, we can operate in most tropical or temperate regions - wherever there's seagrass, coral reefs and mangroves! 

Prior to spinning out, the research team successfully mapped more than 300,000 sq km of coastal ecosystems across 74,000 km of coastline at either 5 or 10 m resolution, using nationally aggregated reference data to ensure highest accuracies possible.