Please join the Department of Geography and Atmospheric Science for the latest in our weekly Colloquium series. This week, Professor Naupaka Zimmerman will present, "Estimating Soil Carbon Dioxide Fluxes Across National Ecological Observatory Network Sites." 

Soils contain a large amount of the Earth's carbon. Measuring the rates of carbon dioxide (CO2) emission from the soil to the atmosphere across diverse ecosystems is an essential component needed to model and understand global environmental change. The rate at which this carbon gets released as CO2 depends on a number of factors, including changes in soil microbial activity and environmental characteristics. Understanding how these fluxes change over time and space has been challenging to quantify empirically across scales due to the types of measurements needed. The NSFsupported National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) makes continuous measurements of all the required components to determine soil carbon flux (the balance between the rate of carbon buildup vs. discharge as CO2) at each NEON site, but NEON does not provide an estimate of surface CO2 flux from soil. The delivery of computed soil CO2 flux values as a higher-level data product has been a widely-sought but so far unavailable data stream from NEON. This talk will describe a recently completed project that developed and field-validated a freely available R package to easily and rapidly calculate soil CO2 flux at any core terrestrial NEON site. These soil flux measurements are now being used to inform ecological forecasting initiatives.

The colloquium is in Malott 2001 at 3:30. As always, there will be a pre-lecture reception with refreshments in Malott 3022.