Browsing by Subject "ENERGY FLUXES"
Now showing items 1-4 of 4
-
(2020)Rotation forestry including clearcutting is a common method of practising forestry in Fennoscandia. Clearcutting in peatland forests markedly increases environmental loading: leaching of nutrients and methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) fluxes from soil. Continuous cover forestry has been suggested as an alternative because it does not include clearcutting but partial harvesting. However, impacts of partial harvesting on greenhouse gas fluxes are not well understood and in peatlands have not been studied at all. We conducted a partial harvest by removing 70% of the total stem volume in a mature nutrient-rich peatland forest in Southern Finland. The aim was to investigate how partial harvesting a peatland forest affects CH4 and N2O balances, and how much different surface types contribute to the balances. We used automatic and manual chamber methods to measure fluxes from both harvest and uncut control site. Fluxes were measured from the forest floor, logging trails, and ditches. Fluxes from these surface types were upscaled to obtain net ecosystem-level fluxes during two postharvest summers (June-August 2016 and 2017). After the harvest, forest floor CH4 fluxes did not change significantly at the harvested site compared to the control site. However, fluxes at logging trails increased significantly. N2O fluxes increased at the harvest site in the post-harvest years, but so did those at the control site as well. Upscaling CH4 fluxes to ecosystem-level indicated that despite their small area (2.4%), emissions from ditches could be large on ecosystem-scale, but their uncertainty was high, while the logging trail CH4 fluxes (20% of the total area) were small. In contrast, N2O fluxes from ditches were low, but the logging trail fluxes comprised 35-38% of the total surface balance. The overall conclusion is that partial harvesting did not cause considerable changes in CH4 and N2O fluxes from a forestry-drained peatland.
-
(2017)The biogenic CO2 surface atmosphere exchange is investigated and linked to vegetation cover fraction for seven sites (three urban and four non-urban) in the northern hemisphere. The non-rectangular hyperbola (NRH) is used to analyse the light-response curves during period of maximum ecophysiological processes, and to develop two models to simulate biogenic vertical CO2 fluxes. First, a generalised set of NRH coefficients is calculated after linear regression analysis across urban and non-urban ecosystems. Second, site-specific NRH coefficients are calculated for a suburban area in Helsinki, Finland. The model includes a temperature driven equation to estimate ecosystem respiration, and variation of leaf area index to modulate emissions across the year. Eddy covariance measured CO2 fluxes are used to evaluate the two models at the suburban Helsinki site and the generalised model also in Mediterranean ecosystem. Both models can simulate the mean daily trend at monthly and seasonal scales. Modelled data typically fall within the range of variability of the observations (differences of the order of 10%). Additional information improves the models performance, notably the selection of the most vegetated wind direction in Helsinki. The general model performs reasonably well during daytime but it tends to underestimate CO2 emissions at night. This reflects the model capability to catch photosynthesis processes occurring during the day, and the importance of the gross primary production (GPP) in modifying the net ecosystem exchange (NEE) of urban sites with different vegetation cover fraction. Therefore, the general model does not capture the differences in ecosystem respiration that skew nocturnal fluxes. The relation between the generalised NRH plateau parameter and vegetation cover improves (R-2 from 0.7 to 0.9) when only summer weekends with wind coming from the most vegetated sector in Helsinki and well-watered conditions for Mediterranean sites are included in the analysis. In the local model, the inclusion of a temperature driven equation for estimating the ecosystem respiration instead of a constant value, does not improve the long-term simulations. In conclusion, both the general and local models have significant potential and offer valid modelling options of biogenic components of carbon exchange in urban and non-urban ecosystems.(C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
-
(2018)Photosynthesis provides carbon for the synthesis of macromolecules to construct cells during growth. This is the basis for the key role of photosynthesis in the carbon dynamics of ecosystems and in the biogenic CO2 assimilation. The development of eddy-covariance (EC) measurements for ecosystem CO2 fluxes started a new era in the field studies of photosynthesis. However, the interpretation of the very variable CO2 fluxes in evergreen forests has been problematic especially in transition times such as the spring and autumn. We apply two theoretical needle-level equations that connect the variation in the light intensity, stomatal action and the annual metabolic cycle of photosynthesis. We then use these equations to predict the photosynthetic CO2 flux in five Scots pine stands located from the northern timberline to Central Europe. Our result has strong implications for our conceptual understanding of the effects of the global change on the processes in boreal forests, especially of the changes in the metabolic annual cycle of photosynthesis.
-
(2020)Quantifying global photosynthesis remains a challenge due to a lack of accurate remote sensing proxies. Solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) has been shown to be a good indicator of photosynthetic activity across various spatial scales. However, a global and spatially challenging estimate of terrestrial gross primary production (GPP) based on satellite SIF remains unresolved due to the confounding effects of species-specific physical and physiological traits and external factors, such as canopy structure or photosynthetic pathway (C-3 or C-4). Here we analyze an ensemble of far-red SIF data from OCO-2 satellite and ground observations at multiple sites, using the spectral invariant theory to reduce the effects of canopy structure and to retrieve a structure-corrected total canopy SIF emission (SIFtotal). We find that the relationships between observed canopy-leaving SIF and ecosystem GPP vary significantly among biomes. In contrast, the relationships between SIFtotal and GPP converge around two unique models, one for C-3 and one for C-4 plants. We show that the two single empirical models can be used to globally scale satellite SIF observations to terrestrial GPP. We obtain an independent estimate of global terrestrial GPP of 129.56 +/- 6.54 PgC/year for the 2015-2017 period, which is consistent with the state-of-the-art data- and process-oriented models. The new GPP product shows improved sensitivity to previously undetected 'hotspots' of productivity, being able to resolve the double-peak in GPP due to rotational cropping systems. We suggest that the direct scheme to estimate GPP presented here, which is based on satellite SIF, may open up new possibilities to resolve the dynamics of global terrestrial GPP across space and time.
