Description
Vegetation plays an important role in urban areas by reducing the urban heat island effect, sequestering carbon emissions, and providing socioeconomic benefits to the surrounding areas. However, the roles and distributions of urban forests have historically been ignored or underestimated. This presentation uses the campus of Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN, as a case study to quantify the aboveground vegetative biomass of campus trees. Tree biomass is calculated with data from the Purdue Arboretum and family-specific allometric relationships based on each tree's diameter at breast height to estimate the total carbon storage available within campus trees. Biomass estimates of urban forests can be used in future studies to model the relationship between landcover, canopy cover, and field collected tree measurements to develop map layers of predicted biomass distribution for urban environments where field data is not available for all trees. Biomass layers are useful for increasing the accuracy of atmospheric carbon cycling models by predicting the relative strength of the urban vegetation carbon sink.
Start Date
11-2018
Document Type
Presentation
Keywords
urban, forest, biomass, allometry, Purdue
Session List
Lightning Talk
Included in
How much do Purdue's trees weigh? Estimating biomass in urban areas
Vegetation plays an important role in urban areas by reducing the urban heat island effect, sequestering carbon emissions, and providing socioeconomic benefits to the surrounding areas. However, the roles and distributions of urban forests have historically been ignored or underestimated. This presentation uses the campus of Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN, as a case study to quantify the aboveground vegetative biomass of campus trees. Tree biomass is calculated with data from the Purdue Arboretum and family-specific allometric relationships based on each tree's diameter at breast height to estimate the total carbon storage available within campus trees. Biomass estimates of urban forests can be used in future studies to model the relationship between landcover, canopy cover, and field collected tree measurements to develop map layers of predicted biomass distribution for urban environments where field data is not available for all trees. Biomass layers are useful for increasing the accuracy of atmospheric carbon cycling models by predicting the relative strength of the urban vegetation carbon sink.