Hello
I have a few major concerns about running the InVEST Blue Carbon model:
1- In the table of biophysical data that is obtained in the pre-processing stage of the model, there are a number of tabs that I do not know how to calculate them, such as;
biomass/soil-initial
biomass/soil-half-life
biomass/soil-half-life
biomass/soil-low , …-impact-disturb
Is it necessary to calculate all these things to run the model?
2- My most important challenge is related to biomass-yearly-accumulation.
Is there a method to calculate it? I did not find a reference for it. But I guess it relies on radiocarbon dating.
3- Can the information related to the carbon accumulation rate(CAR) be placed in the soil-yearly-accumulation column?
Yes, these table columns are required to be filled out. I believe the appendix in the Coastal Blue Carbon Users Guide tries to provide some help here if you don’t have local data for carbon stocks.
@swolny or @jdouglass might also be able to provide more useful practical information for filling in this table.
Similarly that Users Guide section might provide some help in calculating this accumulation value
That is a good question. Maybe @swolny would be able to help with that?
I’ve just used the Blue Carbon model a few times, and honestly it all comes down to doing a literature search for these values. As Doug mentioned, the User Guide Appendix provides a spreadsheet with some studies to help you get started. And there are likely other studies that have been done either in your local area, regionally, or in similar habitat/climate types.
Soil is often the major place carbon accumulates in coastal systems, so it’s likely to be important for your area of study. The carbon accumulation rate should be fine to use, you just may need to adjust the units to be consistent with the units of other model inputs.
Depending on the vegetation type, biomass may not really accumulate. For example, mangroves will accumulate biomass over time, but seagrass doesn’t really. So I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t find much information on seagrass biomass accumulation, or it’s a very small value. In this case, you may set the biomass accumulation rate to 0.
I don’t know if you’re working with scenarios of change over time, but even if you’re not, you’ll need to fill in the …-impact-disturb fields in the table. If you do not have change/disturbance scenarios, you can set these values to 0.