Seagrasses are vital to our planet, holding thousands of years of carbon, much like rainforests, and offering a significant natural solution for the climate crisis. They also benefit both marine and terrestrial biodiversity and provide benefits to local communities through ecosystem services. However, we are losing seagrasses at an estimated rate of 1.5% per year, with approximately 30% of seagrass meadows lost in the last century. 

Despite the importance of seagrasses to biodiversity, people, and addressing the climate crisis, we have a limited understanding of the extent of seagrass systems and how they have changed over time. At the same time, several groups have been monitoring and mapping these systems for years, which has allowed broadscale estimates to date. With the right partnership and advanced tools, there is an opportunity to bring together the seagrass community to share and harmonize their data, and test and ultimately deploy cutting edge methods to assess and monitor these seagrass systems.   

Our support of Earth Genome contributes to this effort to enhance global understanding of ecosystems impacted by human drivers like climate change. This team aims to define and test the methodology needed to map global seagrass ecosystems and assess seagrass extent and changes by fine-tuning remote sensing AI foundation models and publishing this methodology for the conservation and science community to build on. Earth Genome is working with The Nature Conservancy and other on-the-ground scientists, technologists, and practitioners looking to advance our understanding of the planet’s seagrass systems. 

Seagrass mapping is already happening worldwide, and this project is addressing an extremely complex and technical problem when trying to map seagrass ecosystems from satellite data due to differences in water turbidity (clearness) and different depths at which seagrasses grow from region to region. By leveraging AI and remote sensing advancements, the project seeks to create a scalable blueprint for mapping seagrass ecosystems more efficiently, benefiting and advancing the work of scientific and conservation communities already on the ground. It will test and advance a methodology that will take as much information as possible out of even the smallest of signals being received from space to infer the presence and change of seagrass systems. The aim is to establish a new, simpler, and more powerful methodology for other scientists mapping seagrass ecosystems.  

The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation has a strong history in data and mapping projects that are focused on mapping the extent of change in the natural world; such as our founder's support of the Great Elephant Census and the Allen Coral Atlas, and the foundation's ongoing funding of the conservation applications of Global FinPrint's shark census and the Society for Protection of Underground Networks global mycorrhizal research. Seagrasses are another important system that we need to better understand. As this partnership between Earth Genome and The Nature Conservancy refines these methodologies and shares their findings with the global seagrass community, we remain hopeful that their efforts will lead to a more sustainable future with co-benefits for humans and the natural world. These initiatives not only enhance our understanding of seagrass dynamics but also set a precedent for tackling similar challenges in other vital ecosystems using cutting-edge science and technology approaches.