Abstract

Quantifying Carbon in the Australian Roadside Landscape, A GIS Approach
Track: Climate Change
Authors: Quan Chung, stephanie duce

In a world where a fledgling carbon economy is emerging, vegetation becomes valuable not only for the habitat and ecosystem services it provides, but from an economic perspective - how much carbon does it store? This innovative Australian project aimed to quantify vegetated carbon in road corridors across New South Wales. The ultimate vision of the Road and Maritime Services authority (RMS) was to maximise the carbon sequestration potential of this vegetation. ESRI ArcGIS was employed to solve three key problems; how much RMS managed land is there and where is it? What areas support woody vegetation? How can representative growth conditions be summarised for input to carbon modelling software? The use of GIS had the advantage of allowing analysis of complex, multi-source data across a state larger than Texas. This presentation describes the geospatial analysis performed, outlines challenges encountered and describes how the project could be replicated elsewhere.