Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 1

The project will provide information toward developing a Blue Carbon protocol for assessing the amount of carbon sequestered by eelgrass beds while at the same time providing important spatial data for Pentlatch Seafoods Ltd. to inform their shellfish operations. The participants in this project include North Island College (NIC), K'omoks First Nation (KFN), Pentlatch Seafoods Ltd. (PSL), and Comox Valley Project Watershed (CVPW). This project will provide an opportunity for a new relationship between these four participants and potential to engage in further applied research initiatives. The K'omoks Estuary is known to afford critical habitat to estuarine inhabitants and foreshore resilience to storm surges. Two additional values have been identified for eelgrass: importance for shellfish operations and monetary value in terms of the carbon stored in the underlying sediments (Blue Carbon). This project will estimate the area covered by subtidal eelgrass in K'omoks Estuary, and will include a literature review of methods used to quantify the amount of buried carbon in seagrass meadows. The KFN and NIC students will also collect data for the purposes of quantifying carbon stores by marking estuarine areas covered by subtidal eelgrass. The resulting data will identify the total area covered by subtidal eelgrass and will be used to obtain a detailed bathymetric map of the Estuary. This will allow for the calculation of the amount of carbon stored and sequestered in the K'omoks Estuary and allow PSL to correlate the spatial relationship of eelgrass distribution with the location of their shellfish leases. The company may consider other methods of farming to complement their existing on-bottom shellfish farming to expand production capacity and capitalize on the proximity of eelgrass beds.