Scientific articles that have already applied InVEST urban cooling tend to indicate as “green area” not only woods, parks and forests, but also pastures, lawns and the like. I’ve tested it and I think the hm_ is overestimated, especially as I’m applying the model to a city with a tropical climate and large temperature variations. Do you have any suggestions? Thank you
Hi @jv_martinelli -
I’m not an expert on this model, but it is the case that you can define the properties of your land use classes as you think is appropriate, through the parameters in the biophysical table. So if you know that lawns are not providing much benefit, you can either set them to not be considered green space, or set a low or 0 value for shade, etc, so they have little (or no) effect.
Also, from the User Guide:
The model does not test whether green spaces are contiguous. Thus, many small green spaces within the search distance will have the same effect on urban heat mitigation as a single large green space of the same area within the search distance.
So one reason that you might be seeing an overestimate is that a lot of small patches of grass are being treated like a large contiguous park, when the latter is much more likely to have a significant effect, and the former not much at all. One way to potentially get around this would be to create separate land cover classes for areas that are actually larger parks, versus small patches of lawn, and give these different biophysical table parameters.
It would be great to hear from others who have worked with this issue before!
~ Stacie
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