The National Ocean Account, produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, aims to supply data illustrating the value of coastal ecosystems. Despite interest in their inclusion, kelp forest extent and biomass were not included due to a lack of suitable data. We address this by developing a workflow to map kelp extent and biomass around the continent using field and satellite data sets. Historical kelp morphological measurements are aggregated into an allometric model to estimate total kelp biomass from kelp morphological dimensions estimated from drone imagery and bathymetry. Spectral characterisation of kelps’ reflectance profiles along with radiative transfer modelling – simulating an expected satellite pixel signal under various conditions (e.g., biomass or water quality) – will then provide a means to scale plant measurements from drone to satellite scales. These methods will be applied to estimate kelp total biomass at the site-level (100s m2) from drone data and assess the accuracy of those estimates. Continental scale (10,000s km2) data with an assessed accuracy will then be produced using the same methods on a larger set of images. All told, this research will produce the knowledge and data required to include kelp in the National Ocean Account using remote sensing.