Project Funding: 2014 - 2018

NRA: 2014 NASA: Carbon Monitoring System   

Funded by NASA

Abstract:
Coastal Blue Carbon ecosystems such as mangroves, salt marshes and seagrass beds have the highest total carbon densities of all ecosystems. Although they only represent 3% of the total forest area, carbon emissions from mangrove destruction at current rates could be equivalent to 10% of carbon emissions from deforestation. The high carbon sequestration coupled with the high risk of destruction make mangroves a prime candidate for carbon mitigation initiatives such as the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD and REDD+). In mangroves especially, the extreme difficulty of the terrain has hindered the establishment of sufficient field plots needed to accurately measure carbon on the scale necessary to relate remotely sensed measurements with field measurements at accuracies of 10% to 20% as required for Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) activities. Furthermore, there is a large gap in knowledge in African mangrove ecosystems. We propose to develop a Mangrove Total Carbon Monitoring system in Gabon, Tanzania and Mozambique, three countries that are investing heavily in scientific and logistical aspects of developing MRV systems, through cooperation of the local governments and scientific institutions with international organizations such as the WWF, the UN-REDD programme, USAID, SilvaCarbon and Global Earth Observations-Forest Carbon Tracking (GEO-FCT). In Mozambique and Tanzania, The East Africa Carbon Mangrove Project was recently initiated by the US Forest Service on behalf of USAID to address carbon cycle issues relative to mangroves. The Zambezi River delta in Mozambique has been selected by WWF Mozambique and implemented by the US Forest Service as a baseline study on carbon stocks in mangroves to provide the basis for inclusion of mangroves in the Mozambique national REDD+ strategy. Through its strategic plan, Le Gabon Emergent, the Government of Gabon has committed to pursue sustainable development and a Gabon Forest Carbon Assessment has been initialized across the country. As part of these 3 initiatives there will be airborne lidar data acquired and made available in mangrove sites in all three countries. We will use a suite of commercial off-the-shelf datasets to estimate forest biomass, extend and cover change over time, including airborne LiDAR, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and Very High Resolution optical (VHR). Our proposed methodology takes into account that most MRV systems require repeated measurements of carbon stocks and acquiring airborne lidar data on a regular timeframe is costly and impractical. Thus we propose to use commercial spaceborne data from optical sensors as well as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) missions. We will to use the most advanced 3-D remote sensing technology - Polarimetric Interferometric SAR or Pol-InSAR - as an operational technology that can augment, or even replace, costly acquisitions of Lidar data for MRV activities. We propose a 3D mapping methodology to quantitatively characterize forest structure and extent as well as change over time and to inform the field measurements site stratification and location. Our research strategy consists in using the airborne lidar to upscale field estimates of biomass to a larger scale and enable validation of TanDEM-X derived estimates of canopy height and biomass. We will develop a present day mangrove extent map using Landsat, SAR (ALOS-2) and Very high Resolution commercial optical data then adapt global forest change mapping algorithms to include mangrove forests and develop a timeseries of mangrove change in all three countries from 1990 to the present day. Finally we will coordinate a Mangrove Carbon Working Group composed of in-country and US experts to coordinate, disseminate and inform field, remote sensing and GIS experts on the use and generation of the data products from this study.

Publications:

Fatoyinbo, T., Feliciano, E. A., Lagomasino, D., Lee, S. K., Trettin, C. 2018. Estimating mangrove aboveground biomass from airborne LiDAR data: a case study from the Zambezi River delta. Environmental Research Letters. 13(2), 025012. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aa9f03

Lagomasino, D., Fatoyinbo, T., Lee, S., Feliciano, E., Trettin, C., Shapiro, A., Mangora, M. M. 2019. Measuring mangrove carbon loss and gain in deltas. Environmental Research Letters. 14(2), 025002. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aaf0de

Simard, M., Fatoyinbo, L., Smetanka, C., Rivera-Monroy, V. H., Castaneda-Moya, E., Thomas, N., Van der Stocken, T. 2018. Mangrove canopy height globally related to precipitation, temperature and cyclone frequency. Nature Geoscience. 12(1), 40-45. DOI: 10.1038/s41561-018-0279-1

Lagomasino, D., Fatoyinbo, T., Lee, S., Simard, M. 2015. High-resolution forest canopy height estimation in an African blue carbon ecosystem. Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation. 1(1), 51-60. DOI: 10.1002/rse2.3

Lee, S., Fatoyinbo, T. E. 2015. TanDEM-X Pol-InSAR Inversion for Mangrove Canopy Height Estimation. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing. 8(7), 3608-3618. DOI: 10.1109/JSTARS.2015.2431646

Lagomasino, D., Fatoyinbo, T., Lee, S., Feliciano, E., Trettin, C., Simard, M. 2016. A Comparison of Mangrove Canopy Height Using Multiple Independent Measurements from Land, Air, and Space. Remote Sensing. 8(4), 327. DOI: 10.3390/rs8040327

2015 NASA Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems Joint Science Workshop Poster(s)

• Mangrove Canopy height and biomass estimates from TanDEM-X and WorldView Stereo photogrammetry   --   (Temilola E. Fatoyinbo, SeungKuk Lee, David Lagomasino, Marc Simard, Carl Trettin, Matthew Hansen, John Poulsen)   [abstract]

More details may be found in the following project profile(s):

• NASA Terrestrial Ecology (TE) Project Profile
• NASA Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) Project Profile