Mapping Mangroves to Farm Bivalves
Northern Mozambique has the highest recorded levels of marine biodiversity in East Africa. Poverty is widespread within communities here, and they are highly dependent on marine resources for their own subsistence. The Our Sea Our Life programme has been working with local fisher women and men since 2013 and has established 70km2 of Locally Managed Marine Areas (LMMAs). These LMMAs support local fishers to manage resources sustainably and protect a variety of key habitats such as seagrass, intertidal areas and mangroves, benefitting the fish and macro-invertebrate species found here.
In addition to this, Our Sea Our Life is seeking to reduce pressure on these key marine systems whilst also creating jobs for these communities by diversifying livelihoods; the programme has supported two female groups in Cabo Delgado to set up sustainable bivalve farms. In order to help these small enterprises deliver the existing demand, we have recently tested the market for bivalves in Pemba (see sprint 1 blog here: Testing the market for bivalves in Pemba | by Ana Pinto | Frontier Technologies Hub | Medium) as the first step in developing community-based aquaculture, for which our initial plan was to provide a platform to directly link fishers with markets.
Nursery groups cultivating mangroves (top) and replanting seedlings (bottom).
Through our first sprint, we learnt that for restaurants to commit to ordering, and serving, bivalves, they needed to have consistent access to high quantities of high-quality bivalves. However, bivalve production by community groups had only just begun, and so they could not yet commit to the quantities needed by restaurants. Therefore, we found that the priority was to sustain the consistent production of bivalves, and only once the market was more established could there be potential to test the role of a digital market connection platform. Our Sea Our Life will continue to provide ongoing support to these local bivalve farming groups (focussing on women), with the aim to reach a level of production which aligns with quality standards for them to access this hospitality market.
As a result of the timeframes needed to achieve production levels required by hotels and restaurants, we made the decision to pivot the direction of the pilot while still maintaining its core principles: promotion of mangrove conservation and diversification of livelihoods for women. We know that at the core of producing high-quality bivalves is sustaining thriving, healthy mangroves that provide micro-organisms which bivalves feed on. In 2019, Our Sea Our Life worked with mangrove nursery groups to restore 25ha of mangrove habitat by planting seedlings of two different mangrove species. However, in 2020, some of these restored mangrove areas were reconverted into salt evaporation ponds as salt producers with the permission of local authorities. We believe this is because the decision made by LMMA stakeholders (local authorities, community members) are not well communicated which is the problem we’ve pivoted to try to solve.
As we take this work forward, we will explore whether a mapping digital platform could improve the understanding of the ecosystem and natural resources by local decision-makers, and consequently help stakeholders, especially women, make decisions that promote preservation and restoration of resources, and diversify livelihoods.
Embedding participation
In order to drive mangrove projection, we used our second and final sprint to look to layer and combine maps that had been put together in a participatory way with communities with available geospatial imagery. The advantage of layering community maps is that ecosystem data will be able to be updated regularly (as we know that open-source aerial maps can often be outdated), resulting in improvements in accuracy of data. By reviewing all existing tools to layer and combine maps, we narrowed down techniques that would be accessible to all — including community members and local authorities — to create a mechanism that could to used to improve stakeholder communication.
Sample satellite images available on the historical imagery of Google Earth Pro.
We believe that maps are a powerful tool to present information and so we understand that they will enable stakeholders to collaborate on habitat monitoring and natural resource management. We designed the maps to depict habitats including beach forests, mangroves, mud flats, seagrass beds, and coral reefs. We assumed that good-quality open access geospatial imagery would be readily available, and so we first set out to see if this was the case for the Mozambican coast. Once confirmed, we looked closely at the advantages and disadvantages of each type of imagery available (see Table 1 below), as well as the software that could layer community participatory maps over geospatial imagery and whether there were suitable platforms to host the final maps, in order to make an informed decision with stakeholders about which would be most appropriate.
What’s next?
Having assessed the options available, our next step after the FTL programme will be to test the use of satellite imagery for participatory habitat mapping sessions together with stakeholders in order to jointly identify which geospatial imagery source, software to layer maps and platform to display the results is best suited. We have received extremely positive feedback from discussing these plans with both the local authorities and communities, who are keen to trial these tools for improving management of habitats and natural resources in collaboration with Our Sea Our Life.
We anticipate that communities (particularly members of the community fishery councils in charge of LMMAs) and local authorities will collaborate with the support of our local partner, AMA, on decision-making and activity planning for natural resource protection through iterative mapping. This will help support bivalve aquaculture through engaging communities and stakeholders more closely in decision-making for habitat management and restoration, supporting the creation and maintenance of healthy habitats — key for farming bivalves. Once proven, we intend to scale this method to all of the sites where Our Sea Our Life is supporting bivalve farming groups and where mangrove restoration is needed.
