The AmeriFlux Network is served by the AmeriFlux Management Project. Read more about the AmeriFlux Management Project and the History of AmeriFlux. You can find key members and stakeholders of the AmeriFlux Management Project on our people page.
About the AmeriFlux Network
AmeriFlux is a network of hundreds of PI-managed field sites across the Americas that use the eddy covariance method to quantify the exchange of water, carbon, and energy between the land surface and the atmosphere. The use of eddy flux towers to gather micrometeorological data allows researchers to scale their observations, providing a unique window into the processes evolving across vast and varied ecosystems, from arctic tundra to arid deserts, over time. Network-at-a-glance gives current statistics on the network, including how many sites and countries are represented, data availability, and data use.
The AmeriFlux Network was established in 1996 as part of a broader effort to standardize the measurement of land-atmosphere exchange across North America and later expanded to include sites throughout Central and South America. It also serves as the American component of the FLUXNET Initiative, which links regional and national hubs like AmeriFlux worldwide. Early support for the network came from many sources, including the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Terrestrial Carbon Program, the DOE’s National Institute of Global Environmental Change (NIGEC), NASA, NOAA and the US Forest Service. The network grew from about 15 sites in 1997 to more than 800 active sites registered today. In 2012, the DOE established the AmeriFlux Management Project (AMP) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) to support the broad AmeriFlux community and the AmeriFlux sites with technical support, site visits, and an extensive data infrastructure to ensure the quality and availability of continuous, long-term ecosystem measurements.
AmeriFlux is an open-access data network providing measurements obtained from varied ecosystem sites across the Americas to a wide range of data users including:
- Academic researchers such as hydrologists and biogeochemists
- Computational scientists and modelers
- Government agencies and resource managers such as agricultural and forest services; and
- The private sector such as instrument and agricultural companies
AmeriFlux datasets, and the understanding derived from them, provide crucial insights about land-atmosphere interactions, hydrologic cycles, plant productivity, and surface energy balance.