Hi, I am Roha. A postgraduate student from NED university of engineering and technology, Karachi. I am doing my masters in Environmental Engineering and working on my thesis regarding carbon sequestration potential of the trees on the campus. I have been collecting individual tree data from the campus and building an inventory. I also plan to do some destructive testing for local wood densities and develop an understanding of how different trees react to different environmental conditions.
I was wondering if I could calibrate the carbon sequestration model for the local data but what would be the road map is still a little unclear.
Looking forward to your response in this matter.
The Carbon Sequestration model is very simple. For each vegetation type, you enter biomass data for up to 4 carbon pools - aboveground biomass, belowground biomass, soil carbon and litter. The model sums these values within each pixel in your land cover map and reports the result.
The model does not include anything about growing trees, or incorporating how they react to environmental conditions. If you need a model that includes climate, growth rates, etc, then you’ll need to use a different model.
Do you want to map carbon at the individual tree level, or extrapolate the data you’re collecting to more of a whole-campus level? Either way, you’ll need a raster map of where each tree is, or the more general land cover of the campus landscape. Then you’ll build a carbon pool table where you enter the biomass data that you’ve been collecting for each tree (if your map has individual trees) or tree type (if you’re doing a more general landscape analysis and not individual trees). If you don’t have data for all 4 carbon pools, that’s fine, just enter 0 for the ones you don’t have.
To see an example of these data inputs, download the sample data for the Carbon model from the Settings window of Workbench. The User Guide also shows an example of the carbon pool table.
hi Stacie,
Thank you for your response but I would like to request your guidance in the following matter:
which is the other model that incorporates climatic conditions?
can I use the individual trees data to model with the basic raster having all the individual tress geotagged?
the carbon pools in the campus are limited like the built up area and the vegetative area and the total area is around 40 ha.?
Waiting for your response.
Roha
I have not used other carbon models, but the one i was thinking of specifically for individual trees is iTree. You’d have to look into it to see if it provides the functionality you need.
If you want to use our carbon model, you’d do something like turn your geolocated tree points into a raster, likely with each tree having its own land use code so you can assign the carbon data that you’re collected to each one. If you only want to map those trees and no other types of vegetation, that’s all you need for the model. If you also want to quantify the vegetation around the trees, you’d need to add the trees to a different land cover map.
However, i’m wondering if you really need to use a model at all. What exactly is the result that you want to create? If it’s just a map of individual tree carbon, can you just bring the geolocated tree points into GIS, assign the carbon values to each one in the attribute table, then symbolize the result based on the carbon values?