Representativeness assessment of the pan-Arctic eddy-covariance site network, and optimized future enhancements
Large changes in the Arctic carbon balance are expected as warming linked to climate change threatens to destabilize ancient permafrost carbon stocks. The eddy covariance (EC) method is an established technique to quantify net losses and gains of carbon between the biosphere and atmosphere at high s...
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ftcopernicus:oai:publications.copernicus.org:bgd94761 2023-05-15T14:36:51+02:00 Representativeness assessment of the pan-Arctic eddy-covariance site network, and optimized future enhancements Pallandt, Martijn Kumar, Jitendra Mauritz, Marguerite Schuur, Edward Virkkala, Anna-Maria Celis, Gerardo Hoffman, Forrest Göckede, Mathias 2021-07-09 application/pdf https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2021-133 https://bg.copernicus.org/preprints/bg-2021-133/ eng eng doi:10.5194/bg-2021-133 https://bg.copernicus.org/preprints/bg-2021-133/ eISSN: 1726-4189 Text 2021 ftcopernicus https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2021-133 2021-07-12T16:22:14Z Large changes in the Arctic carbon balance are expected as warming linked to climate change threatens to destabilize ancient permafrost carbon stocks. The eddy covariance (EC) method is an established technique to quantify net losses and gains of carbon between the biosphere and atmosphere at high spatio-temporal resolution. Over the past decades, a growing network of terrestrial EC tower sites has been established across the Arctic, but a comprehensive assessment of the network’s representativeness within the heterogeneous Arctic region is still lacking. This creates additional uncertainties when integrating flux data across sites, for example when upscaling fluxes to constrain pan-Arctic carbon budgets, and changes therein. This study provides an inventory of Arctic (here >= 60° N) EC sites, which has also been made available online ( https://cosima.nceas.ucsb.edu/carbon-flux-sites/ ). Our database currently comprises 120 EC sites, but only 83 are listed as active, and just 25 of these active sites remain operational throughout the winter. To map the representativeness of this EC network, based on 18 bioclimatic and edaphic variables, we evaluated the similarity between environmental conditions observed at the tower locations and those within the larger Arctic study domain. With the majority of sites located in Fennoscandia and Alaska, these regions were assigned the highest level of network representativeness, while large parts of Siberia and patches of Canada were classified as under-represented. This division between regions is further emphasized for wintertime and methane flux data coverage. Across the Arctic, particularly mountainous regions were poorly represented by the current EC observation network. We tested three different strategies to identify new site locations, or upgrades of existing sites, that optimally enhance the representativeness of the current EC network. While 15 new sites can improve the representativeness of the pan-Arctic network by 20 percent, upgrading as few as 10 existing sites to capture methane fluxes, or remain active during wintertime, can improve their respective network coverage by 28 to 33 percent. This targeted network improvement could be shown to be clearly superior to an unguided selection of new sites, therefore leading to substantial improvements in network coverage based on relatively small investments. Text Arctic Climate change Fennoscandia permafrost Alaska Siberia Copernicus Publications: E-Journals Arctic Canada |
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Open Polar |
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Copernicus Publications: E-Journals |
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ftcopernicus |
language |
English |
description |
Large changes in the Arctic carbon balance are expected as warming linked to climate change threatens to destabilize ancient permafrost carbon stocks. The eddy covariance (EC) method is an established technique to quantify net losses and gains of carbon between the biosphere and atmosphere at high spatio-temporal resolution. Over the past decades, a growing network of terrestrial EC tower sites has been established across the Arctic, but a comprehensive assessment of the network’s representativeness within the heterogeneous Arctic region is still lacking. This creates additional uncertainties when integrating flux data across sites, for example when upscaling fluxes to constrain pan-Arctic carbon budgets, and changes therein. This study provides an inventory of Arctic (here >= 60° N) EC sites, which has also been made available online ( https://cosima.nceas.ucsb.edu/carbon-flux-sites/ ). Our database currently comprises 120 EC sites, but only 83 are listed as active, and just 25 of these active sites remain operational throughout the winter. To map the representativeness of this EC network, based on 18 bioclimatic and edaphic variables, we evaluated the similarity between environmental conditions observed at the tower locations and those within the larger Arctic study domain. With the majority of sites located in Fennoscandia and Alaska, these regions were assigned the highest level of network representativeness, while large parts of Siberia and patches of Canada were classified as under-represented. This division between regions is further emphasized for wintertime and methane flux data coverage. Across the Arctic, particularly mountainous regions were poorly represented by the current EC observation network. We tested three different strategies to identify new site locations, or upgrades of existing sites, that optimally enhance the representativeness of the current EC network. While 15 new sites can improve the representativeness of the pan-Arctic network by 20 percent, upgrading as few as 10 existing sites to capture methane fluxes, or remain active during wintertime, can improve their respective network coverage by 28 to 33 percent. This targeted network improvement could be shown to be clearly superior to an unguided selection of new sites, therefore leading to substantial improvements in network coverage based on relatively small investments. |
format |
Text |
author |
Pallandt, Martijn Kumar, Jitendra Mauritz, Marguerite Schuur, Edward Virkkala, Anna-Maria Celis, Gerardo Hoffman, Forrest Göckede, Mathias |
spellingShingle |
Pallandt, Martijn Kumar, Jitendra Mauritz, Marguerite Schuur, Edward Virkkala, Anna-Maria Celis, Gerardo Hoffman, Forrest Göckede, Mathias Representativeness assessment of the pan-Arctic eddy-covariance site network, and optimized future enhancements |
author_facet |
Pallandt, Martijn Kumar, Jitendra Mauritz, Marguerite Schuur, Edward Virkkala, Anna-Maria Celis, Gerardo Hoffman, Forrest Göckede, Mathias |
author_sort |
Pallandt, Martijn |
title |
Representativeness assessment of the pan-Arctic eddy-covariance site network, and optimized future enhancements |
title_short |
Representativeness assessment of the pan-Arctic eddy-covariance site network, and optimized future enhancements |
title_full |
Representativeness assessment of the pan-Arctic eddy-covariance site network, and optimized future enhancements |
title_fullStr |
Representativeness assessment of the pan-Arctic eddy-covariance site network, and optimized future enhancements |
title_full_unstemmed |
Representativeness assessment of the pan-Arctic eddy-covariance site network, and optimized future enhancements |
title_sort |
representativeness assessment of the pan-arctic eddy-covariance site network, and optimized future enhancements |
publishDate |
2021 |
url |
https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2021-133 https://bg.copernicus.org/preprints/bg-2021-133/ |
geographic |
Arctic Canada |
geographic_facet |
Arctic Canada |
genre |
Arctic Climate change Fennoscandia permafrost Alaska Siberia |
genre_facet |
Arctic Climate change Fennoscandia permafrost Alaska Siberia |
op_source |
eISSN: 1726-4189 |
op_relation |
doi:10.5194/bg-2021-133 https://bg.copernicus.org/preprints/bg-2021-133/ |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2021-133 |
_version_ |
1766309386543693824 |