SBIR Phase II: Resilience for Waterfront Infrastructure

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to drive restoration and preservation of coastal wetlands by unlocking their ecosystem value. Many coastal communities are underserved and do not have resources to adapt to increasing risks from erosion, storms, and sea level rise. Enhanced coastal resilience and restoration promotes biodiversity, which bolsters coastal communities through improved fisheries, tourism, and water quality, as well as other "blue economy" benefits.

This project will enable coastal communities to access funds from monetizing project co-benefits and promote nature-based solutions with economic and environmental benefits. This project advances NSF’s mission by developing analytical tools that can directly benefit national welfare. The project can create significant impact by enabling more environmentally sustainable adaptation techniques, expanding financing alternatives for coastal wetlands restoration, and promoting equitable actions.

This solution creates ecological and socio-economic benefits by addressing the need for more sustainable communities given coastal migration trends and rising sea levels and increased storm intensities.

This approach utilizes high-resolution satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to accurately and systematically measure the carbon stock in coastal wetlands. The project will include an integrated suite of technologies for new datasets, a modeling framework to identify coastal shorelines at risk of erosion, high fidelity maps of blue carbon stock, and the characterization of biodiversity in relation to the environment.

This project is expected to make significant contributions to the protection of coastal wetlands and the development of novel methods to analyze blue carbon stocks. The project will build on the existing software platform developed during Phase I and extend its application to determine the different blue carbon pools in marshes and mangrove ecosystems.

By accurately measuring erosive conditions and carbon stock at a high spatial resolution in coastal wetlands, this solution has the potential to enable markets to meet sustainability goals while preserving the numerous benefits that wetlands provide to the environment and communities. The project would also decrease the uncertainty in the measurement of blue carbon at a high spatial resolution, a critical factor for creating trustworthy and reliable carbon credits, which can be used to finance the restoration and preservation of coastal wetlands.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.