Highlighting Mangrove Converted Farms

Organization: GDST Secretariat

Challenge Owner Name: Susan Roxas

Contact: sroxas@wwf.org.ph

Video Link

Challenge Statement:

The rapid growth of aquaculture has brought about, unfortunately, a significant conversion of mangrove forests into seafood farming sites. For many downstream buyers, they have no idea whether they are contributing to this conversion with purchases from farms located on sites of former mangrove forests. Empowering those same buyers with easy tools for checking on the land use history of farm sites could help leverage market power to halt this conversion of precious mangrove forests.

Background:

EPCIS is an information sharing standard for communicating object-level event data between trading partners. The standard defines what data should be captured and in which manner. The species which fishers harvest beyond the principally demanded species is often called, bycatch. Since farms have more control over the specimens reared, commercial buyers can be more specific in their demand and grade requirements. Even so, the growing of animals is a biological process which cannot be perfectly controlled leaving under & oversized specimens.

Background:

Aquaculture is one among a handful of forces causing the conversion of mangroves but it is leading cause. The biodiversity contained within mangroves are often unparalleled except by the most vibrant ecosystems on our planet. They are also powerful natural features for keeping shorelines resistant to coastal erosion. Significant research also indicates mangroves are able to sequester vast amounts of carbon. Mangroves play a vital role in the long-term health of our planet and are deserving of much greater protection. Seafood will often be exchanged among several hands before landing on a plate. Shrimp farming is the leading cause of mangrove conversion among aquaculture species and is often conducted by very small operations of which there are tens of thousands worldwide. This fragmentation and length of seafood supply chains makes visibility into the environmental impact of source farms a challenge for downstream buyers. Utilizing the GDST-formats will help seafood-buying companies be able to better identify the underlying farms they source from. This enhanced visibility needs to be coupled with a mechanism for downstream buyers to check for mangrove conversion in the history of a farm site.

Possible Solution:

A successful solution will leverage existing public datasets to cross-reference the geocoordinates of a farming site to illuminate the potential risk that the farm was established where a mangrove forest used to exist. The solution will have an intuitive interface for seafood-buying users to input a single or multiple farm sites to determine a risk score for the site(s) in question. Mangrove conversion for shrimp production has occurred throughout most of the second-half of the 20th century and all of the 21st century. The Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) recognizes May 1999 as the cut-off date for shrimp farms which were built on converted mangrove forest. While it is useful in checking for mangrove conversion prior to this date, the availability of data and the nature of the norm from ASC suggests it is a sufficient measure for this challenge. The solution could include a way of receiving and processing EPCIS-formatted traceability event data and automating the cross-checks of the farm sites included in the data. The solution could also include a repository of previously checked farm sites with risk scores of the likelihood of previous mangrove coverage at the farm site.

Resources:

• NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center’s Global Mangrove Forests Distribution, 2000
• The impact of shrimp farming on mangrove ecosystems, by Elizabeth Ashton in CAB Reviews Perspectives in Agriculture Veterinary Science Nutrition and Natural Resources 3(003) · January 2010
• Remote Sensing in Mapping Mangrove Ecosystems — An Object-Based Approach, by Vo et. al, in Remote Sensing 2013, 5, 183-201
• CMS: Mangrove Forest Cover Extent and Change across Major River Deltas, 2000-2016
• NASA’s data portals
  • https://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/dataset_index.php
  • https://search.earthdata.nasa.gov/search
• European Space Agency data missions