Abstract
Knowledge of seagrass distribution is limited to a few well-studied sites and poor where resources are scant (e.g. Africa), hence global estimates of seagrass carbon storage are inaccurate. Here, we analysed freely available Sentinel-2 and Landsat imagery to quantify contemporary coverage and change in seagrass between 1986 and 2016 on Kenya's coast. Using field surveys and independent estimates of historical seagrass, we estimate total cover of Kenya's seagrass to be 317.1 ± 27.2 km2, following losses of 0.85% yr−1 since 1986. Losses increased from 0.29% yr−1 in 2000 to 1.59% yr−1 in 2016, releasing up to 2.17 Tg carbon since 1986. Anecdotal evidence suggests fishing pressure is an important cause of loss and is likely to intensify in the near future. If these results are representative for Africa, global estimates of seagrass extent and loss need reconsidering.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 20180227 |
Number of pages | 4 |
Journal | Biology Letters |
Volume | 14 |
Early online date | 26 Oct 2018 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 28 Nov 2018 |
Bibliographical note
We thank Ankje Frouws, Caroline Wanjiru,Peter Musembi, Tom Peter Kisiengo and Laitani Suleimani
for their help in collecting groundtruthing data, staff at
KMFRI Gazi for organization and the people of Gazi for
hosting.
FUNDING
This work was funded by a grant from the British Council
Newton Fund, grant no. 275670159
Data Availability Statement
Supporting datasets have been uploaded to the Dryadrepository: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.n08qs2s [9]
Keywords
- seagrass
- mapping
- Kenya
- blue carbon