I have been working on carbon storage and carbon sequestration in my city, and have found that the carbon footprint from rapid urbanization is much higher than the amount of carbon currently absorbed by the existing green spaces, primarily due to their fragmented nature and less coverage proportion.
In addition to the traditional greenery practices on the ground, I plan to create carbon reservoirs by converting rooftops with surface areas greater than 100 m² into green roofs, aiming to increase the green coverage in my city. The goal is to understand how carbon sequestration might change over the next 50 years as these rooftops are converted into green roofs. However, I have been unable to successfully develop these rooftop cover change scenarios so far in ArcGIS. What kind of procedure should I follow to successfully develop these scenarios?
Any help or guidance you could offer would be greatly appreciated!
If you are using the InVEST Carbon Storage model, we only have the land use map and carbon pool table to work with when creating scenarios. So I’d recommend starting with the baseline land use map, identifying the rooftop areas > 100m2, then changing the land use map in those places to a new class called something like “green roofs” to create a future land use map. Then you’ll give small (or 0) values for the carbon pools to the baseline developed land use class in the carbon pool table, and larger carbon values to the “green roofs” class.
Now, how you identify the rooftop areas is an exercise for you to figure out. If you have building footprint polygons from some source (like Open Street Map, or even better a more local layer), you could calculate their area, select for the ones > 100m2, then use that layer to change the corresponding pixels in the baseline land use map to “green roofs”. There are undoubtedly other ways, like evaluating satellite data, or perhaps there are tools in QGIS or ArcGIS to help, but I’m not familiar with these.