How green is your garden? A new carbon cost calculator developed with help from University of Guelph researchers is intended to help homeowners and landscapers track carbon sequestration and emissions from lawn and garden maintenance.
How green is your garden? A new carbon cost calculator developed with help from University of Guelph researchers is intended to help homeowners and landscapers track carbon sequestration and emissions from lawn and garden maintenance.
Dr. Eric Lyons, a professor at the Department of Plant Agriculture in the Ontario Agricultural College, was contacted by the Canadian Nursery and Landscape Association (CNLA) to help develop a tool to determine how well a lawn sequesters carbon. Intended to account for the hidden carbon costs of maintaining trees and turfgrasses, the tool tracks carbon capture by urban lawns and trees that offsets carbon dioxide emissions produced from activities like mowing a lawn or applying fertilizer.
“The CNLA reached out to us because they wanted the right metric for their calculator so that when the public uses it, they can confidently say, ‘This makes sense in my yard,’” said Lyons, also the director of the Guelph Turfgrass Institute at U of G.
Now, he and his research team have published the metrics that informed the calculator in the journal Sustainability.
Read more at University of Guelph
Photo Credit: Salyasin via Pixabay
