Poulter (CMS 2020): Blue Carbon Prototype Products for Mangrove Methane and Carbon Dioxide Fluxes (BLUEFLUX)
Benjamin Poulter, NASA GSFC, benjamin.poulter@nasa.gov (Presenter)
Erin Delaria, NASA GSFC, erin.r.delaria@nasa.gov (Presenter)
Mangrove forests provide a range of ecosystem services that include habitat for biodiversity, food and fiber for local communities, and structural protection from shoreline erosion and flooding. However, a variety of drivers that include coastal development and aquaculture, sea level rise, and an increase in hurricanes are leading to rapid losses of mangroves around the world. In response, government and non-governmental organizations are actively working to restore and protect the world’s remaining mangroves using science to understand demography and growth, and then applying these findings to inform conservation management and planning.
Recent scientific advances, partly supported by NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System (CMS), have led to novel datasets that describe historical distributions and changes in mangrove area, mangrove canopy height, aboveground biomass and carbon stocks. Carbon has emerged as the ‘currency’ for mangrove ecosystem restoration, as seen by the role of ‘blue carbon’ (including mangroves, as well as tidal marshes, kelp forests, and coral reefs) in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 14). Mangroves are one of the most carbon rich ecosystems in the world and have tremendous potential to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, thereby partly offsetting industrial emissions while at the same time providing a conservation funding mechanism. To enable these efforts, we need to 1) better understand blue carbon fluxes, in addition to stocks, 2) quantify how carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) are exchanged between mangrove ecosystems the atmosphere and the ocean, and 3) determine how these fluxes are affected by disturbance history, and 4) what the net radiative effect of the two gases are in the context of climate mitigation.
Our proposed project, BLUEFLUX, will quantify blue carbon fluxes by developing a prototype, daily-gridded (500 m) CO2 and CH4 flux product for the Caribbean region for the time period 2000-present day. We address CMS 2020 relevance through “the accounting of blue carbon ecosystems (quantification and change - e.g. regional/global extent and temporal distribution)”. A data-driven upscaling methodology, using machine learning, will be applied to existing NASA remote-sensing products based on a synthesis of existing ground observations and the acquisition of new airborne eddy covariance measurements over southern Florida. Over ten-site years of mangrove eddy covariance and chamber data will be standardized to contribute to an environmental response function analysis. These measurements will be combined with six aircraft deployments, carried out over southern Florida to quantify CO2 and CH4 fluxes for a gradient of mangrove types, disturbance histories, tidal stage, and season, to fill gaps in the ground-observing network.
Our team includes experts in trace-gas field measurements and data synthesis from Yale University, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) CARbon Airborne Flux Experiment group (CARAFE), and remote sensing and modeling experts from East Carolina University and NASA GSFC. Over the past decade, the team has established relationships with a diverse group of stakeholders in Florida and throughout the Caribbean, for example with the Everglades National Park, ELTI (Empowering People to Restore and Conserve Tropical Forests), the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute (CINVESTAV), and the Center for International Forestry (CIFOR). The upscaled carbon flux product will be used to provide information to i) complete the greenhouse gas budgets of mangrove ecosystems in the region and at project scale, ii) inform stakeholders on how these fluxes have changed over time, and iii) quantify the net radiative forcing of mangrove ecosystems across a matrix of disturbance histories from hurricanes to better inform climate mitigation activities.
Associated Project(s):
Poster Location ID: 33
Presentation Type: Poster
Session: Poster Session 1
Session Date: Wednesday (9/27) 1:15 PM