SensFish Environmental Intelligence for Seagrass and Coastal Restoration

Seagrass meadows are among the most carbon-dense ecosystems on Earth. They sequester carbon up to 35 times faster than tropical rainforests, support coastal fisheries and protect shorelines from erosion. They are also among the fastest disappearing. In the UK alone, an estimated 92% of seagrass has been lost over the past century.

Conventional monitoring relies on dive surveys that are expensive, limited by season and impossible to scale. A survey campaign covers a handful of sites over a few days, and its results are months old by the time they reach a decision-maker. That is too slow for conservation programmes and blue-carbon initiatives that must show recovery across entire estuarine systems.

SensFish Ltd, a UK marine intelligence SME, builds proprietary environmental intelligence infrastructure for fisheries, coastal ecosystems and marine restoration. In this project, SensFish led the development of a seagrass habitat intelligence capability for a marine steward of Scotland, combining satellite Earth Observation, environmental data and geospatial analytics. The aim was continuous monitoring that complements physical surveys and gives restoration stakeholders evidence for assessment and reporting.

Astro42 worked alongside the SensFish technical and environmental intelligence team on selected engineering and implementation components: geospatial interface development, dashboard functionality, environmental data integration, and operational reporting workflows.

The platform gives users one interface for continuous habitat observations, environmental trends, site-level monitoring outputs and reporting tools, built for restoration assessment and environmental decision support.

Monitoring conditions, satellite coverage and oceanographic data availability vary widely across coasts and estuaries. The platform combines multiple environmental data layers with confidence-aware processing to stay transparent about how observations and outputs are presented.

Astro42 focused on the practical work of bringing satellite and oceanographic data into one operational interface. We built geospatial visualisation components for the dashboard, developed data ingestion and harmonisation workflows across multiple environmental data sources, and engineered the automated reporting pipeline that turns platform outputs into formats for restoration funding submissions and stakeholder communications.

Regional Scottish restoration stakeholders and environmental teams now have more continuous environmental visibility through one geospatial monitoring interface. The work also lays foundations for a broader coastal restoration and environmental monitoring initiative expected to evolve over the coming decade.

The project produced scalable technical workflows for integrating Earth Observation and environmental datasets into coastal ecosystem monitoring applications.