Blue carbon
Tonnes of blue carbon near any coast
Tap a spot on the map and Biohotspot gives the tonnes of carbon nearby, from open world maps of mangrove and tidal marsh soil carbon, and a rough figure for seagrass.
Where the figures come from
Mangrove soil carbon comes from Sanderman et al. (2018, CC0) and tidal marsh soil carbon from Maxwell et al. (2024, CC BY 4.0), both for the top metre of soil. Seagrass has no world carbon map, so Biohotspot multiplies the seagrass area by the IPCC default of 108 tonnes of carbon per hectare (2013 Wetlands Supplement) and shows it as a rough figure.
Blue carbon in Australian marine parks
The marine park pages give the tonnes of carbon in the top metre of mangrove and tidal marsh soil inside each park, where those maps have data: Australian marine parks.
The datasets
Each dataset has its own page with its publisher, licence, files and citation, among the open datasets.
More of what Biohotspot does
- Gap analysis
Marine protected area gap analysis
Draw an area and Biohotspot lists the habitats inside it, how much of each, what is already protected, and how far each habitat is from its protection target, with the uses of the sea it overlaps and the data that is missing.
- Reserve design
Run Marxan online for marine reserve design
Biohotspot runs Marxan, the open-source reserve design tool, in the browser: choose an area, run the options in about a minute, and get each option's habitat targets met, its cost to other sea users and a recommended plan with a PDF report.
- Data access
Marine and coastal data for QGIS, ArcGIS, Python and AI agents
One OGC API address serves every open Biohotspot vector layer to QGIS and ArcGIS with no sign-in; a REST API, a Python client and an MCP server with 12 tools give scripts and AI agents the same data, with a sign-in or a personal API key.