This portion of the larger project is focused on modeling the relationship between soil carbon in grasslands and the cattle industry in the American west. The objective is to incentivize the sustainable management of soil in grazing systems by quantifying its value as natural capital. In order to recover accurate economic values for soil, we will be using measurements of net primary productivity, soil carbon/organic matter, and soil make up for the entire western United States.
Our NPP estimates will come from MODIS17A3 yearly averages from the NASA Earth Data site which will then be processed using ENVI. Our soil data will be downloaded from the USDA’s Web Soil Survey using ArcGIS. We will compliment this data using data sets from the Bureau of Land Management with grazing and land management schemes in order to determine the relationship between human decision making and economic systems and the accounting price of soil. By applying capital theory to the management of soil in the American west, we will be able to incentivize the treatment of soil as capital stock and enable sustainable management strategies.