Lab 02: Carbon emissions from land- cover change
Introduction
This assignment represents the first lab of this course, that we are doing in R. The reasons for switching to R are manifold. On one hand, in this type of model we don’t have any feedbacks incorporated, which makes the use of Vensim not necessary. On the other hand, it builds on good feedback from previous years that (a) the implementation is easier in R compared to Vensim and (b) more generally suggested to keep R as a component of this class to maintain practicing the scripting language. Lastly, it is always a good training to keep using multiple software packages in tools in order to be able to adapt to different environments and systems.
Specifically, we will work with a Carbon Bookkeeping model (CBKM) that has been introduced to the land use / climate change community by Richard Houghton1 and modified in different studies in different land-use contexts. Our study case will be the Gran Chaco in South America, which is a global deforestation hotspot where during the past 35 years more than 30% of all woodlands have been disappearing for establishing croplands or pastures. These land-use changes have resulted in major carbon emissions, which have been quantified using the same approach that we will use for this assignment2. Although the data are slightly outdated by now, they still serve the purpose of getting used to a CBKM.
The assignment goes over two weeks. In week 1, we will get to know the CBKM, and how it is implemented in R, while in week 2 we explore some scenarios of land-cover change and associated carbon emissions. Important for both weeks will be that you have a close look at the paper by Baumann et al. (2017) Global Change Biology, which we provide in moodle. There you find all coefficients needed and a general explanation on the study context and the purpose of a CBKM. So, please make sure you read the paper when doing the homework.