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Aboveground and Belowground Carbon Storage by Property

Variables
Aboveground Carbon Storage by Property
  • Label:
  • Definition: To estimate the biomass of individual properties, a Power Law model was used to predict the biomass of a given property by creating a biomass raster with a 10-meter by 10-meter pixel size (the same size as our sampled plots). To develop a biomass raster for the entire Greenbelt District, multiple computing machines were necessary. We used Open Storage Research Infrastructure (OSiRIS) to process large amounts of LiDAR data in the form of LAS files. First, we copied LiDAR files covering the entirety of the Greenbelt District over to OSiRIS. Next, we set up jobs to run on the Open Science Grid (OSG). Each tile was analyzed using R version 4.0.4 and the lidR package in R, with one tile per job. Then, each output file was copied back from OSiRIS. Output TIF images were then mosaiced into a single raster in ArcGIS Pro. Any cells of the mosaiced raster that fell outside of a manually digitized forest land cover feature class provided by the City of Ann Arbor were set to equal zero in order to prevent buildings from erroneously contributing to the final biomass calculations. The total biomass of a single property was considered to be the summation of all pixel values that fell within or intersected the digitized property boundary. This was calculated by using the Zonal Statistics as Table tool in ArcGIS Pro. The total carbon storage of a given property was then assumed to be 50% of the total biomass at that property.
  • Type: Nominal
  • Missing values: None specified
Belowground Carbon Storage by Property
  • Label:
  • Definition: Forest soils make up 20.6% of the Greenbelt district and wetland soils make up 8.7%. Carbon stored in forest and wetland soils in various Greenbelt properties, based on NRCS Web Soil Survey results for medium bulk density and organic content.
  • Type: Nominal
  • Missing values: None specified