WRIGHT PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE CARBON SEQUESTRATION SERVICES

Wright Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB) employs approximately 27,406 military, civilian and contract employees in the greater Dayton area. The base was established in 1948 as a merger of Patterson and Wright fields and is home to the 88th Air Base Wing.

Woolpert teamed with the University of Dayton Research Institute (UDRI) to develop a carbon mitigation plan for the Air Force Research Labs (AFRL) at WPAFB that would lead to a negative carbon footprint for a U.S. Air Force base. Woolpert was hand-picked to explore creation of a GIS-enabled carbon management tool for WPAFB based on our expertise in the areas of sustainability, geographic information systems (GIS), and geospatial services at USAF installations. Using available geospatial data, the research team calculated the rate at which vegetation at the base captures or sequesters carbon emissions from the atmosphere on base, a value called the Net Primary Production of the base’s plant life.

Woolpert created a collaborative GIS workspace that included aerial photography and LiDAR encompassing the project area, including features such as buildings, water, and impervious surfaces. Researchers found that the vegetation on WPAFB sequesters an average of 21,527 tons of carbon per year from the atmosphere, off-setting a portion of the greenhouse gases emitted by base activities.

The research is only a first step in leveraging geospatial data for managing ecosystems. Future work could create a “live” carbon source/sink GIS tool that is fully integrated into the base’s existing Installation Geospatial Information & Services (IGI&S) program (formerly GeoBase) to support base planning. Geospatial analysis could also offer year-over-year change detection in carbon sequestration resulting from land use decisions and mapping of photovoltaic (PV) potential, biomass calculations (amount of carbon in base lands), sun orientation and rooftop capacity.