SBIR Phase II: Resilience for Waterfront Infrastructure

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）二期项目的更广泛/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，没有资源来适应侵蚀、风暴和海平面上升带来的日益增加的风险。加强沿海恢复力和恢复可促进生物多样性，通过改善渔业、旅游业和水质，以及其他“蓝色经济”效益，促进沿海社区的发展。该项目将使沿海社区能够从项目共同效益货币化中获得资金，并推广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。该项目可以通过启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选择以及促进公平行动，产生重大影响。鉴于沿海移民趋势、海平面上升和风暴强度增加，该解决方案解决了对更可持续社区的需求，从而创造了生态和社会经济效益。该方法利用高分辨率卫星图像和人工智能技术，准确、系统地测量了沿海湿地的碳储量。该项目将包括一套用于新数据集的综合技术，一个用于识别面临侵蚀风险的沿海海岸线的建模框架，蓝碳储量的高保真地图，以及与环境相关的生物多样性特征。预计该项目将对滨海湿地的保护和蓝碳储量分析新方法的发展做出重大贡献。该项目将以第一阶段开发的现有软件平台为基础，扩展其应用范围，以确定沼泽和红树林生态系统中不同的蓝碳库。通过以高空间分辨率精确测量沿海湿地的侵蚀条件和碳储量，该解决方案有可能使市场实现可持续发展目标，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额的关键因素，可用于资助沿海湿地的恢复和保护。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.