Blue carbon (BC) ecosystems are an important coastal resource, as they provide a range of goods and services to the environment. They play a vital role in the global carbon cycle by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating the impacts of climate change. However, there has been a large reduction in the global BC ecosystems due to their conversion to agriculture and aquaculture, overexploitation, and removal for human settlements. Effectively monitoring BC ecosystems at large scales remains a challenge owing to practical difficulties in monitoring and the time-consuming field measurement approaches used. As a result, sensible policies and actions for the sustainability and conservation of BC ecosystems can be hard to implement. In this context, remote sensing provides a useful tool for mapping and monitoring BC ecosystems faster and at larger scales. Numerous studies have been carried out on various sensors based on optical imagery, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), light detection and ranging (LiDAR), aerial photographs (APs), and multispectral data. Remote sensing-based approaches have been proven effective for mapping and monitoring BC ecosystems by a large number of studies. However, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive review on the applications of remote sensing techniques for mapping and monitoring BC ecosystems. The main goal of this review is to provide an overview and summary of the key studies undertaken from 2010 onwards on remote sensing applications for mapping and monitoring BC ecosystems. Our review showed that optical imagery, such as multispectral and hyper-spectral data, is the most common for mapping BC ecosystems, while the Landsat time-series are the most widely-used data for monitoring their changes on larger scales. We investigate the limitations of current studies and suggest several key aspects for future applications of remote sensing combined with state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for mapping coastal vegetation and monitoring their extents and changes.

This study investigates the effectiveness of gradient boosting decision trees techniques in estimating mangrove above-ground biomass (AGB) at the Can Gio biosphere reserve (Vietnam). For this purpose, we employed a novel gradient-boosting regression technique called the extreme gradient boosting regression (XGBR) algorithm implemented and verified a mangrove AGB model using data from a field survey of 121 sampling plots conducted during the dry season. The dataset fuses the data of the Sentinel-2 multispectral instrument (MSI) and the dual polarimetric (HH, HV) data of ALOS-2 PALSAR-2. The performance standards of the proposed model (root-mean-square error (RMSE) and coefficient of determination (R²)) were compared with those of other machine learning techniques, namely gradient boosting regression (GBR), support vector regression (SVR), Gaussian process regression (GPR), and random forests regression (RFR). The XGBR model obtained a promising result with R² = 0.805, RMSE = 28.13 Mg ha⁻¹, and the model yielded the highest predictive performance among the five machine learning models. In the XGBR model, the estimated mangrove AGB ranged from 11 to 293 Mg ha⁻¹ (average = 106.93 Mg ha⁻¹). This work demonstrates that XGBR with the combined Sentinel-2 and ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 data can accurately estimate the mangrove AGB in the Can Gio biosphere reserve. The general applicability of the XGBR model combined with multiple sourced optical and SAR data should be further tested and compared in a large-scale study of forest AGBs in different geographical and climatic ecosystems.

This study proposes a hybrid intelligence approach based on an extreme gradient boosting regression and genetic algorithm, namely, the XGBR-GA model, incorporating Sentinel-2, Sentinel-1, and ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 data to estimate the mangrove above-ground biomass (AGB), including small and shrub mangrove patches in the Red River Delta biosphere reserve across the northern coast of Vietnam. We used the novel extreme gradient boosting decision tree (XGBR) technique together with genetic algorithm (GA) optimization for feature selection to construct and verify a mangrove AGB model using data from a field survey of 105 sampling plots conducted in November and December of 2018 and incorporated the dual polarimetric (HH and HV) data of the ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 L-band and the Sentinel-2 multispectral data combined with Sentinel-1 (C-band VV and VH) data. We employed the root-mean-square error (RMSE) and coefficient of determination (R²) to evaluate the performance of the proposed model. The capability of the XGBR-GA model was assessed via a comparison with other machine-learning (ML) techniques, i.e., the CatBoost regression (CBR), gradient boosted regression tree (GBRT), support vector regression (SVR), and random forest regression (RFR) models. The XGBR-GA model yielded a promising result (R² = 0.683, RMSE = 25.08 Mg·ha⁻¹) and outperformed the four other ML models. The XGBR-GA model retrieved a mangrove AGB ranging from 17 Mg·ha⁻¹ to 142 Mg·ha⁻¹ (with an average of 72.47 Mg·ha⁻¹). Therefore, multisource optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) combined with the XGBR-GA model can be used to estimate the mangrove AGB in North Vietnam. The effectiveness of the proposed method needs to be further tested and compared to other mangrove ecosystems in the tropics.

Quantifying total carbon (TC) stocks in soil across various mangrove ecosystems is key to understanding the global carbon cycle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Estimating mangrove TC at a large scale remains challenging due to the difficulty and high cost of soil carbon measurements when the number of samples is high. In the present study, we investigated the capability of Sentinel-2 multispectral data together with a state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) technique, which is a combination of CatBoost regression (CBR) and a genetic algorithm (GA) for feature selection and optimization (the CBR-GA model) to estimate the mangrove soil C stocks across the mangrove ecosystems in North Vietnam. We used the field survey data collected from 177 soil cores. We compared the performance of the proposed model with those of the four ML algorithms, i.e., the extreme gradient boosting regression (XGBR), the light gradient boosting machine regression (LGBMR), the support vector regression (SVR), and the random forest regression (RFR) models. Our proposed model estimated the TC level in the soil as 35.06–166.83 Mg ha⁻¹ (average = 92.27 Mg ha⁻¹) with satisfactory accuracy (R ² = 0.665, RMSE = 18.41 Mg ha⁻¹) and yielded the best prediction performance among all the ML techniques. We conclude that the Sentinel-2 data combined with the CBR-GA model can improve estimates of the mangrove TC at 10 m spatial resolution in tropical areas. The effectiveness of the proposed approach should be further evaluated for different mangrove soils of the other mangrove ecosystems in tropical and semi-tropical regions.

Seagrass has been acknowledged as a productive blue carbon ecosystem that is in significant decline across much of the world. A first step toward conservation is the mapping and monitoring of extant seagrass meadows. Several methods are currently in use, but mapping the resource from satellite images using machine learning is not widely applied, despite its successful use in various comparable applications. This research aimed to develop a novel approach for seagrass monitoring using state-of-the-art machine learning with data from Sentinel–2 imagery. We used Tauranga Harbor, New Zealand as a validation site for which extensive ground truth data are available to compare ensemble machine learning methods involving random forests (RF), rotation forests (RoF), and canonical correlation forests (CCF) with the more traditional maximum likelihood classifier (MLC) technique. Using a group of validation metrics including F1, precision, recall, accuracy, and the McNemar test, our results indicated that machine learning techniques outperformed the MLC with RoF as the best performer (F1 scores ranging from 0.75–0.91 for sparse and dense seagrass meadows, respectively). Our study is the first comparison of various ensemble-based methods for seagrass mapping of which we are aware, and promises to be an effective approach to enhance the accuracy of seagrass monitoring.

Seagrass provides numerous valuable ecosystem services across a wide range of climatic regions. However, in terms of area and habitat, this resource is in decline globally and there is an urgent need for accurate mapping of extant meadows and biomass to support sustainable seagrass blue carbon conservation and management. This study develops a novel method for a binary mapping of seagrass distribution and estimating seagrass above-ground biomass (AGB) by applying a suite of advanced machine learning (ML) algorithms combined with and without a metaheuristic optimization approach (particle swarm optimization – PSO) to various combinations of multispectral (Sentinel-2) and synthetic aperture radar (Sentinel-1) remote sensing data. Our results reveal that the Sentinel-1 data has potential for the binary mapping of seagrass meadows using an extreme gradient boosting (XGB) model (scores of precision (P) = 0.82, recall (R) = 0.90, and F₁ = 0.86) but is less effective at estimating AGB. The optimal method for estimation of AGB used both Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery, the XGB model, and PSO optimization (coefficient of determination (R²) = 0.75, root mean squared error (RMSE) = 0.35, Akaike information criteria (AIC) = 24.80, Bayesian information criteria (BIC) = 44.70). Our findings contribute novel and advanced methods for seagrass detection and improvement of AGB estimation, which are fast and reliable, use open-source data and software and should be easily applicable to intertidal zones across many regions of the world.