Material factors for buildings, roads and rail-based infrastructure in CONUS

<p>Dynamics of societal material stocks such as buildings and infrastructures and their spatial patterns drive surging resource use and emissions. Building up and maintaining stocks requires large&nbsp;amounts of resources; currently stock-building materials amount to almost 60% of all materials used by humanity. Buildings, infrastructures and machinery shape social practices of production&nbsp;and consumption, thereby creating path dependencies for future resource use. They constitute the physical basis of the spatial organization of most socio-economic activities, for example as&nbsp;mobility networks, urbanization and settlement patterns and various other infrastructures. The data presented hereinafter constitute that basis for&nbsp;quantifying material stocks in a country that exhibits one of the highest material stocks in the world,&nbsp;the United States.</p><p><strong>Data</strong><br>This dataset includes the following material intensities:</p><ul><li>material intensity in mass per volume of above-ground building (kg/m³) per building type</li><li>material intensity in mass per area of road (kg/m²) per road type</li><li>material intensity in mass per area of railway track (kg/m²) per railway&nbsp;type</li><li>material intensity in mass per area (kg/m²) per other infrastructure type</li></ul><p>Material intensity factors are split into the following 15 material categories: metals (iron/steel, copper, aluminum, all other metals), non-metallic minerals (concrete, bricks, glass, aggregate except for concrete, all other minerals), biomass-based materials (timber, other biomass-based materials), petrochemical-based materials (bitumen, other petrochemical-based materials), insulation, and other materials.&nbsp;</p><p>Material intensity factors are available for each of the following&nbsp;19&nbsp;aggregated stock type categories:&nbsp;</p><ul><li><i>Buildings</i>: low-rise residential (RES-LR), mid-rise residential (RES-MR), low/mid-rise residential / commercial mixed use (RCMU), high-rise residential / commercial mixed use (RCMU-HR), residential / commercial mixed use skyscrapers (RCMU-SKY), commercial / industrial (C/I), and mobile homes and light-weight buildings (MLB)</li><li><i>Roads</i>: motorway, primary roads, secondary roads, tertiary roads,&nbsp;local roads, rural roads</li><li><i>Rail-based infrastructure</i>: railway, subway, tram</li><li><i>Other</i>: airport runways, parking lots, other remaining impervious</li></ul><p>Since construction standards for residential&nbsp;buildings and gravel roads vary between different climate zones across the conterminous United States, material intensities for low-rise residential buildings (RES-LR), local roads and tracks were further differentiated according to climate zones.</p><p>The dataset provides three sets of material intensity factors for sensitivity purposes: mean, low, and high. Low and high material intensity factors represent 25th and 75th percentiles of data points per material category and stock type.&nbsp;</p><p>In addition,&nbsp;the following building volume conversion factors required for deriving material intensity factors for buildings are included in the dataset:</p><ul><li>floor-to-floor height per building type</li><li>roof volume factors (m³/m² footprint) per building type</li><li>share of useable area (SUA) in gross floor area per building type</li></ul><p>Building volume conversion factors are based on&nbsp;Haberl et al. (2021) and were used in the calculation of the above-ground volume for those case studies where either the&nbsp;floor-to-floor height&nbsp;or&nbsp;information regarding the roof volume were unavailable, or&nbsp;where only the UA, but not the GFA necessary for the calculation of the above-ground volume were specified.</p><p><strong>Further information</strong><br>The dataset complements a scientific article which includes further information and an in-depth dataset description. For further information, please see the publication below or contact Dominik Wiedenhofer (dominik.wiedenhofer@boku.ac.at).&nbsp;<br><br>D.&nbsp;Frantz, F.&nbsp;Schug, D.&nbsp;Wiedenhofer, A. Baumgart, D.&nbsp;Virág, S.&nbsp;Cooper, C.&nbsp;Gomez-Medina,&nbsp;F.&nbsp;Lehmann, T.&nbsp;Udelhoven, S.&nbsp;van der Linden, P.&nbsp;Hostert, H.&nbsp;Haberl, Unveiling patterns in human dominated landscapes through mapping the mass of US built structures.&nbsp;<i>Nat Commun</i>. <strong>14</strong>, 8014 (2023), doi: <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-43755-5">10.1038/s41467-023-43755-5</a><br><br>Check out this peer-reviewed article detailing&nbsp;the overall approach and novel method:</p><p>H. Haberl, D. Wiedenhofer, F. Schug, D. Frantz, D. Virág, C. Plutzar, K. Gruhler, J. Lederer, G. Schiller, T. Fishman, M. Lanau, A. Gattringer, T. Kemper, G. Liu, H. Tanikawa, S. van der Linden, P. Hostert, High-Resolution Maps of Material Stocks in Buildings and Infrastructures in Austria and Germany. <i>Environ Sci Technol</i>. <strong>55</strong>, 3368–3379 (2021), doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.0c05642">10.1021/acs.est.0c05642</a></p><p>Visit our&nbsp;<a href="https://boku.ac.at/understanding-the-role-of-material-stock-patterns-for-the-transformation-to-a-sustainable-society-mat-stocks">website</a>&nbsp;to learn more about our project MAT_STOCKS -&nbsp;Understanding the Role of Material Stock Patterns for the Transformation to a Sustainable Society.</p><p><strong>Funding</strong><br>This research was funded by&nbsp;the European Research Council (ERC) under the&nbsp;European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (MAT_STOCKS, grant&nbsp;agreement No 741950).&nbsp;</p>