Abstract
Evaluating the efficacy of climate mitigation measures requires
quantifying urban greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Both anthropogenic and
biogenic GHG fluxes are important in urban systems, and disaggregation
is necessary to understand urban GHG fluxes. One vegetative community
common in these urban environments is turfgrass, and the Vegetation
Photosynthesis and Respiration Model (VPRM), commonly used to create
prior fluxes necessary for determining urban carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes
via inversion modeling, had assumed this Plant Functional Type (PFT) to
be dormant in the winter. Two urban turfgrass flux towers in
Indianapolis show a photosynthetic drawdown in the winter. We use data
from these towers to create a new turfgrass PFT parameter set for VPRM.
The new turfgrass PFT enables VPRM to simulate photosynthetic activity
during winter, unlike the previously used parameter sets for grassland.
We also find that less-managed lawns like cemeteries need different
parameters than heavily managed lawns like golf courses, and seasonally
changing parameters are needed to model these turf lawns. We use the
revised VPRM to explore daily and seasonal variability in turfgrass
fluxes and their impact, integrated across the city, on urban ecosystem
CO2 fluxes. This study illustrates the importance of representing
turfgrass as a unique PFT when quantifying urban GHG fluxes and the
biases resulting from misrepresentation.