InVEST Coastal Blue Carbon preprocessor question

Hello,

I wanted to see if anybody could give some insight into the preprocessor, and how LULC maps are inputted into the InVEST Coastal Blue Carbon model. I’m looking to find out out what the preprocessor does with the LULC maps, and what the model does between inputting the maps and generating the transition matrix.

I apologies if this question is confusing, I’m fairly new to the model and any advice is appreciated.

Thank you,
Theo

Hi @Theo, and welcome to the forum!

Have you checked out the User Guide chapter for Blue Carbon? There is a section Identifying LULC Transitions with the Preprocessor that provides some idea of what the pre-processor does, although it might not be as detailed as you’d like (in which case, let me know and I’ll update it…) There is also sample data for the model, which you may have installed when you installed InVEST, which provides an example of the landcover maps, the table that is used to define them for the pre-processor, and also provides the output from the pre-processor, so you can see what the transition matrix looks like.

Under the hood, I think what the model is doing is overlaying the landcover rasters, and identifying pixels where the landcover changes between them. Based on this, it creates the matrix table, containing all of the landcover types, and an indication of where the landcover goes from blue carbon habitat to non-habitat (disturbance) remains blue carbon habitat (accumulation) or remains non-habitat (no carbon change).

~ Stacie

Under the hood, I think what the model is doing is overlaying the landcover rasters, and identifying pixels where the landcover changes between them. Based on this, it creates the matrix table, containing all of the landcover types, and an indication of where the landcover goes from blue carbon habitat to non-habitat (disturbance) remains blue carbon habitat (accumulation) or remains non-habitat (no carbon change).

Yep, this is exactly what the CBC preprocessor does under the hood! Once the transitions have been identified, you’ll need to manually make sure that the impact of any carbon disturbances (high-impact, med-impact, low-impact) is specified for each transition. As @swolny mentioned, the sample data will includes examples of both the inputs to the preprocessor and the outputs from the preprocessor that are then used by the model for your reference.

Sorry for the delay, but thank you @swolny and @jdouglass for your responses! Yes I have checked out the user guide and sample dataset - I was just looking for the under the hood info that you shared.

I have an additional question about the output of the blue carbon sample data. I’m looking to analyze land cover transitions, or whether a transition occurred or not in excel. I intended to pull this information from the attribute table, but there doesn’t appear to be an attribute table to download. Is there another way to extract information, possibly binary, from the files?