Abstract

CALLEJA APESTEGUI, Felipe  and  LOPEZ-ARIAS, Fernando. Wetland Inventory for Coastal Protection (IHPC): a tool for coastal management in Costa Rica. Ingeniería [online]. 2022, vol.32, n.2, pp.32-51. ISSN 2215-2652.  http://dx.doi.org/10.15517/ri.v32i2.49060.

Costa Rica has approximately 1 500 km of coastline, with wetlands that offer a wide variety of ecosystem services, including coastal protection. The quantification of this service requires research in these wetlands, and for this, it is necessary to gather them in an inventory that includes their localization and basic characteristics. This type of inventory does not exist specifically for coastal wetlands in Costa Rica. Thus, the objective of this research is to create the first version of an inventory of wetlands that offers coastal protection in the country. The National Wetland Inventory (INH), and a 2005 mangrove cartography were used as the starting point. The coastal wetlands that were not included in these two sources were identified with a semi-automatic procedure, based on the analysis of vegetation indexes derived from a Sentinel 2 satellite image, and a manual delimitation using an orthophoto of 2017. The new inventory includes 464 coastal wetlands, from which 180 are not included in the INH. These new areas were characterized with the same information included in the INH to assure the compatibility between both databases. In addition, all 464 wetlands were characterized with some of the natural and anthropic conditions that might affect future research related to coastal protection. The result is a free access geographic database that includes the localization and general characteristics of the Costa Rican wetlands that offer coastal protection and could be used in future research not only in this topic, but in coastal studies in general.

Keywords : Database; ecosystem services; geographic information systems; mangroves; remote sensing..

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