Predicting Seagrass Success: De-Risking Blue Carbon Projects
- David Lamb
- Sep 3
- 3 min read
Seagrass meadows are a cornerstone of the emerging blue economy. As powerful carbon sinks and biodiversity hotspots, their restoration and conservation offer immense opportunities. Yet, these projects face high uncertainty. With the UK having lost up to 92% of its historical seagrass meadows, the need for restoration have never been higher.
The primary barrier for investors, developers, and insurers has been a lack of predictive, investment-grade data. How can you confidently select a site, assess its potential, ensuring it has the best chance of success.Â
The AMBROSIA Project: A New Standard for Seagrass Intelligence
To solve this, Ocean OS has launched the AMBROSIA project in Falmouth Bay, Cornwall. In partnership with marine autonomy leader Hydrosurv and subsea sensing specialist Subnero, we are moving beyond simple mapping to answer the question: How do environmental conditions control the health, growth, and carbon-sequestration potential of a seagrass meadow?
Our approach is deploying modern marine robotics. For the 2026 growing season, we will pair:
A continuous seabed lander with acoustic and optical sensors logging data as frequently as every ten minutes. This allows us to measure the physical drivers - currents, waves, light availability (PAR), and temperature - that seagrass experiences throughout the day and in response to specific events.
Monthly autonomous vessel surveys that use a high-resolution altimeter to record the full acoustic echo from the seabed. Our machine learning models then analyse the shape of this echo to determine seagrass canopy height and density.
This provides the evidence needed to build predictive models capable of showing how specific environmental drivers impact seagrass health.
The Goal: Investment-Grade Intelligence for Carbon & Biodiversity
The AMBROSIA project’s primary goal is to develop the capability to generate map layers that are not just scientifically robust, but commercially relevant. The entire research process is being designed so that its future outputs can align with the world’s leading carbon and biodiversity frameworks.
Upon completion, this research will allow us to create data layers that can:
Identify Restoration Potential:Â Highlight coastal areas with the most suitable environmental conditions for successful seagrass growth, allowing developers to focus their efforts where they are most likely to succeed.
Map Environmental Risk:Â Pinpoint zones susceptible to chronic stress from factors like poor water clarity, disruptive currents, or temperature extremes. This helps in avoiding sites with a high probability of failure.
Estimate Carbon Capture Potential:Â Provide spatially-aware estimates of likely carbon sequestration rates.
Critically, these future capabilities are being developed from the ground up to support the requirements of Verra's Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) Methodology VM0033 and the UK's Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) Statutory Metric. This will translate complex environmental science into the specific, verifiable numbers that underpin financial and legal value.
Looking Ahead: Applications of the AMBROSIA Research
While AMBROSIA is currently a research and development initiative, its success will unlock specific, tangible applications. The models and workflows we are building will form the foundation of an analytical toolkit that provides developers, insurers, and investors with the foresight they need. The ability to screen entire coastlines for restoration potential or to generate the verifiable, high-resolution baseline data required for formal crediting will reduce uncertainty and streamline the path to creating bankable natural assets.
