Brad Reed: This is a demonstration of the LandCarbon Viewer, which is a collaborative
effort between the U.S. Geological Survey and UC Berkeley's Geospatial Innovation Facility.
The LandCarbon Project is a project that assesses the carbon storage and fluxes in the Nation's
ecosystems, and the LandCarbon Viewer are data and tools to explore and access this
information.
Let's go first to the Explore page.
This page first brings up a map of the ecoregions of the conterminous United States.
These ecoregions are areas with similar patterns of land cover, ecology, land use and topography;
and as you put your cursor over each of the regions, you get the name of the ecoregion.
We look first at the Ozark Ouachita-Appalachian Forests ecoregion.
Click on it and we get a map of the spatial extent of this ecoregion and a description
of it as well.
Over on the right, we get a pie chart that shows a distribution of ecosystem types within
the ecoregion.
This one is composed of 73 percent forests, 23 percent agriculture, and smaller percentages
of other ecosystem types.
Further on the right, we have the projected ecosystem change by the year 2050 under different
IPCC scenarios: A1B, A2, and B1.
In the chart below, we get information on the amount of carbon storage that is currently
within this ecoregion.
We can look at the total carbon storage here in blue, or the carbon storage by ecosystem
type—forests, agriculture, etc.
We can also get the projected carbon storage as well, under the A1B or the B2 scenario,
for example.
You can see an increase in carbon storage potential under the B1 scenario, which is
more sustainable.
We can also get the carbon net flux between 2005 and 2050 for different ecosystem types
and under different scenarios.
Again, you can see the reduction of carbon flux in the more developed IPCC scenarios.
We also can show the underlying data behind each of these charts.
It shows the ecosystem type, the baseline area, the projected area of land cover, and
the change percentage.
We also have the show data feature under the carbon data as well.
In addition to being able to explore the national assessment data, we can also distribute the
data from this website.
We have available datasets that went into producing the national assessment, as well
as data produced by the assessment.
This includes biomass carbon stock, burned area and severity, forest stange age, land
use and land cover, and many other types.
If we click on one of these datasets—land use and land cover, in this example—we see
a map display, and then we can download these data in a number of different ways.
We can do it by ecoregion; we can upload a file, such as state boundaries; or we can
draw a rectangle over our area of interest.
We can then specify the data range that we want to download.
For example, we may want land cover for every year from 2010 to 2050 under the B1 scenario.
Just click "Download" and the data will come to you.
We also have information here summarizing the national assessment; a brief description
of the methods; and more information about the study.
This includes how to get the assessment reports; understanding ecosystems; and understanding
uncertainty.
And that is the LandCarbon Viewer.