Ain Marsad عين مرصد
Are the mangroves we planted still alive? We check every creek on the UAE coast from space, year by year, for free.
"Ain Marsad" means "the watchful eye." It turns free Sentinel-2 satellite photos into a map that shows where mangroves grew, where they were lost, and where planting didn't survive.
A promise with two numbers, and we only measure one
The UAE has pledged to plant 100 million mangroves by 2030. Planting is easy to record. Someone is there, a photo is taken, and the number goes into a report. What happens to that seedling six months later usually isn't written down anywhere.
Logged at the moment of planting, by the people doing it.
Checked only in small sample plots. A creek that failed can go unnoticed if nobody surveyed it.
mangroves the UAE pledged to plant by 2030, announced at COP26.
Source 1of planted and mature mangroves in Abu Dhabi Emirate, storing roughly 3 million tonnes of carbon (EAD estimate).
Source 2UAE mangrove area, 7,081 ha in 2017 to 9,142 ha in 2024, measured from Sentinel-2 in a published study.
Source 3Mangroves grow in the hardest place on the coast to survey
They sit in soft mud between high and low tide, cut by channels that fill and empty twice a day. You can reach the edge on foot and a little more by boat. The middle of a large forest is slow going. Doing that from Abu Dhabi to Ras Al Khaimah every year isn't realistic, so surveys sample a few plots and estimate the rest.
| Method | Coverage | How often | Running cost | Can look back in time? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Field survey | Sample plots | Occasional | Teams, boats, time | No |
| Ain Marsad | Every creek on the coast | Any year, in minutes | Free public data and tools | Yes, back to 2017 |
Ain Marsad doesn't replace field teams. It tells them which creek to visit.
Three steps from satellite photo to answer
Take a year of photos
Sentinel-2 photographs the whole UAE coast about every five days. In Google Earth Engine we stack one year of images and keep the middle value for each pixel. That strips out clouds, haze and some of the tide effect.
Label every pixel
A random forest model, trained on known sites such as Jubail Island, the Eastern Mangroves and Khor Kalba, decides whether each 10 m pixel is mangrove or not. We test it on labelled examples it never saw.
Put two years side by side
Comparing an early map with a recent one splits the coast into gained, lost, and planted-but-not-surviving areas, with hectares for each.
Mangrove is the only thing on our coast that's green and wet at once
Healthy plants reflect lots of infrared light, which we measure with NDVI. Water absorbs infrared, which we measure with NDWI. Desert shrubs are green but dry. The open sea is wet but not green. Mud and sand are neither. Mangrove scores high on both.
Wet mud, shallow water and algae can still look alike in one photo. That's why we use a trained model and a full year of images instead of one snapshot.
Concept diagram. Positions are qualitative, not measured values.
Compare two years and the coast splits into three colours
Growing where there was none before. Successful planting or natural spread. This is what the 2030 target is really asking about.
There before, gone now. Construction, dredging or die-off. Loss never shows up in a planting report, and it can quietly cancel the gains.
A known planting site where the model sees no mangrove two or more years later. This tells a team exactly which creek to replant.
The third colour needs the location and year of each planting. Where we have that record, we can flag failures. Where we don't, we report gain and loss only.
What you'll see us run
Everything runs in Google Earth Engine from a laptop. No hardware, nothing to set up on the day. Results appear here once we've measured them.
The coast, before and after
An early year beside a recent year, mangroves highlighted on both. You can see the difference from across the room.
Shown liveThe change map
Gain in green, loss in red, with hectares gained, hectares lost and the net difference.
Hectare totals: shown liveOne creek, up close
We zoom into a single site and step through it year by year. A national statistic becomes one real place with one clear answer.
Site: shown liveHow often we're right
Accuracy on labelled examples the model never saw during training. We'll report our own number, whatever it is.
Accuracy: reported liveCheap to run, complete, and able to look backwards
No running cost
Satellite images are free, and Google Earth Engine is free for research and non-commercial use. No sensors to install or repair after salt water gets to them. Running cost is usually why monitoring projects stop.
The whole coast
Every creek, including the ones nobody would think to visit.
History on day one
The archive goes back to 2017, so we can measure change that has already happened instead of waiting years for a baseline.
Independent check
The 2030 target is a public promise. This measures it without relying on planters to report on their own work.
We'd rather tell you the limits ourselves
It can't see seedlings
A 10 m pixel is far bigger than a young plant. Sites usually appear after two to three years of growth. So it answers "did the planting survive?", not "did it happen?"
Tides add error
A forest looks different at high and low tide. Yearly median images reduce this but don't remove it. It's probably our biggest source of error.
Mangrove or not, that's all
It doesn't separate species. Almost all UAE mangrove is one species, so this matters little here.
It doesn't replace field work
It can't measure tree health, height or wildlife. It tells a team where to go, not what they'll find.
Our accuracy will be lower than published research
Researchers used bigger datasets and weeks of training. We're students building this in days, and we'll report our own results.
The method isn't new
Researchers have already mapped UAE mangroves with Sentinel-2. Our contribution is a year-by-year change map anyone can read.
A yearly mangrove report for every emirate, produced for free
Area per emirate, change since last year, and a list of places where planting seems to have failed. After that, the same method could be tested on seagrass, and on any other country's mangrove pledge.
The information to answer this question already exists. It's been free for years. What was missing was someone willing to look.
Applied Technology School, Al Ain
Hamdan Nabil Butaih Abdulla Al Shamsi · Mayed Khalid Abdulla Alnaqbi
Supervisor: Rahma Al-Najjar
- Tolley, G. "Cop26: UAE pledges to plant 100 million mangroves by 2030." The National, 9 Nov 2021. thenationalnews.com
- Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi, via Abu Dhabi Mangrove Initiative. "Mangroves: Important Nature-Based Solution." 15 Mar 2024. admangroves.ae
- "Artificial Intelligence Mangrove Monitoring System Based on Deep Learning and Sentinel-2 Satellite Data in the UAE (2017–2024)." arXiv:2411.11918, Nov 2024 (preprint). arxiv.org
- European Space Agency. Sentinel-2 mission. sentiwiki.copernicus.eu
- Google Earth Engine. earthengine.google.com