SBIR Phase II: Resilience for Waterfront Infrastructure

小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第二阶段项目的更广泛的商业影响是通过释放其生态系统价值来推动沿海湿地的恢复和保护。许多沿海社区服务不足，没有资源来适应日益增加的侵蚀、风暴和海平面上升的风险。增强的海岸复原力和恢复促进了生物多样性，生物多样性通过改善渔业、旅游业和水质以及其他“蓝色经济”利益来支持沿海社区。该项目将使沿海社区能够从项目共同收益货币化中获得资金，并促进具有经济和环境效益的基于自然的解决方案。该项目通过开发能够直接造福于国家福利的分析工具来推进国家科学基金会的使命。该项目可通过以下方式产生重大影响：采用更具环境可持续性的适应技术，扩大沿海湿地恢复的融资替代办法，以及促进公平行动。鉴于沿海移徙趋势、海平面上升和风暴强度增加，这一解决办法解决了对更可持续的社区的需求，从而创造了生态和社会经济效益。这种方法利用高分辨率卫星图像和人工智能来准确和系统地测量滨海湿地的碳储量。该项目将包括一套适用于新数据集的综合技术、一个确定面临侵蚀风险的沿海海岸线的建模框架、高保真的蓝色碳储量地图，以及与环境有关的生物多样性特征。预计该项目将为保护沿海湿地和开发分析蓝碳储量的新方法做出重大贡献。该项目将建立在第一阶段开发的现有软件平台的基础上，并扩大其应用范围，以确定沼泽和红树林生态系统中不同的蓝碳池。通过以高空间分辨率准确测量沿海湿地的侵蚀条件和碳储量，这一解决方案有可能使市场在实现可持续发展目标的同时，保留湿地为环境和社区提供的众多好处。该项目还将减少在高空间分辨率下测量蓝碳的不确定性，这是创建可信赖和可靠的碳信用的关键因素，可用于资助沿海湿地的恢复和保护。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.