This work, led by Austin Troy of the University of Colorado, Denver, uses Earth observation data and modeling to develop ecosystem accounts at the national and subnational scale for the U.S. End-users of this work include USGS and other Federal agencies who support the integration of ecosystem services & their values into national economic accounts. As part of the team’s contributions to the Natural Capital Accounting Working Group, they are developing methods for assessing urban ecosystem accounts for the US, with a focus on quantifying services derived from urban trees. These models evaluate two critical ecosystem services that are provided by urban trees but not currently accounted for on a national scale: (1) heat mitigation and (2) rainfall interception.
The team’s urban ecosystem service work then raised the question of whether national level databases are sufficient or modeling ecosystem services in cities, which are highly spatially heterogeneous at a fine scale. For instance, is the National Land Cover Database tree canopy layer sufficiently fine grained or accurate to map fine scale urban tree cover for this purpose? Further analyses look at several of the best available national data products (i.e. National Tree Cover Layer, National Impervious Cover Layer, National Building Footprint, etc.) to assess whether they might support the modeling of urban ecosystem services.
Results are published in scientific journals as well included on the Artificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services (ARIES) Explorer platform as a user-friendly was to access network-hosted ecosystem services day and models.