It’s been more than a week since the start of my internship at mojaglobal. We’re working with the GCBM (Generic Carbon Budget Model), which runs on the FLINT (Full Land Integration Tool) software, and my project is Research Data Sources for Carbon Sequestration in Forests.
What does “sequestration” mean?
I saw this word for the first time. According to nationalgrid.com:
“Carbon sequestration – the practice of removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it – is one of the many approaches being taken to tackle climate change.”
In this case, we’re talking about the carbon that trees help absorb from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, which is then stored in the forms of forest biomass (trunks, branches, roots, leaves), dead wood, harvested wood, and soils.
Carbon is released back into the atmosphere in disturbance events like wildfires, pest infestation, storms that cause tree mortality, human economic activities, etc.
The GCBM models the different levels of forests’ carbon stocks in various scenarios with data inputs from the user. This helps with monitoring, analyzing future projection and decision making in forest and climate change management.
Tools used
- Web Plot Digitizer
- Markdown
- Python
- R (learning)
- SQL (learning)
- Github Actions (optional but want to learn)
- Data Version Control (optional but want to learn)
I’m currently reading a lot of research papers for data collection, after which I will preprocess these data into the appropriate format in order to run several iterative simulations. Postprocessing includes analyzing the results.
More about Moja Global
Outreachy Internship in Tech 