How to run without changing protected areas?

[oayounis]

Hi @kanishkan91 ... I hope all is well! .. I am trying to run Demeter to downscale projected land uses of 3 GCAM scenario runs for comparison. I intend to aggregate downscaled grids to administrative scales (but finer than the GCAM region scales). I am having a couple of issues though:

1. I am noticing when I run with both Hi and Low protection config files, and aggregate the output back to a regional scale, they don't match for some of the land uses (especially the protected land uses). Is that expected and is there a way to let them match (i.e adjustments to the input files or config files) ?
2. For protected land types, I would ideally like to see the protected lands downscaled but do not expanding. How do I do that?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[kanishkan91]

@oayounis - Do you mean the workflows here- https://zenodo.org/records/11642540? Well those workflows are intended to reproduce high and low protection scenarios, so they would be different. These are designed specifically for a project where we were downscaling different protected area scenarios. I would not recommend using that workflow if you are not interested in alternative protection scenarios.

There are demeter workflows which just use a single protection setting. Perhaps you would need to use that? I think you would be better off using a workflow from this paper- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00669-x

Overall, I think it would be better if you reached out over email regarding your specific question at kanishka.narayan@pnnl.gov

[kanishkan91]

@oayounis Also, to keep the protected area constant with that workflow, you would need to follow the following steps-

1. First , only ever use the low protection configuration since that is the GCAM default
2. Second, update the csv's in the projected folder with the scenarios you want to run
3. Note that protected areas can move historically within a scenario. This is because historical protected areas can change up to 2015. Post 2015 if you re-aggregate everything nothing should change.

Again, let me know if you just want to clarify this over email.

[CGL5230]

Hi @kanishkan91 ! I see a vegetation carbon constraint layer has been added inside this article. After browsing this workflow and Demeter's source code, it seems that all I need to do is to set up the constraint weights for the different ground classes in gcam_regbasin_modis_v6_type5_5arcmin_constraint_alloc.csv and provide the corresponding constraint layer data in the constraints folder. Demeter's ApplyConstraints Class will automatically expand and match.

I'm not sure if I'm understanding this correctly, are there any other details in the process that I should be aware of? For example, if you are aggregating at 0.083 degrees, do you take the mean or total value of the aggregation?