From an operational comfort perspective (science be damned), ideally located flux sites should be placed somewhere easily accessible, near power connection and wireless data coverage, and, preferably, on solid ground. Old Woman Creek has none of the above. Located at the center of a Lake Erie coastal wetland, US-OWC hits all the high notes of… More
The contrast in weather was extreme for 2020 and 2021 at our flux sites located in the semiarid shrublands, grasslands, savannas, and forests of southern Arizona. This was especially true at the Santa Rita Mesquite Savanna site (US-SRM in AmeriFlux vernacular) which had the driest summer monsoon growing season on record in 2020 (42… More
Coastal forested wetlands in the southeastern US provide important ecosystem services, including the conservation of biodiversity, supplying clean, abundant water resources, and the cycling and storage of carbon, which feeds back to stabilize regional climate (Noormets et al., 2010; Sun et al. 2010; Aguilos et al. 2020). However, large areas of these wetlands have been… More
I have a love-hate relationship with winter. As manager of the Niwot Ridge US-NR1 AmeriFlux site (Blanken et al., 1998-present), located in a subalpine forest on the east side of the Rocky Mountains, I experience all the seasons. In winter, I love the falling snow and seeing/feeling the powerful wind howling over a frozen landscape,… More
Feature photo: Jeff Miller, University of Wisconsin-Madison Communications The English word “scale” has a surprisingly broad range of definitions. Whether you think of the scales of a fish, the scale on which you weigh yourself, the music scale you play on an instrument, the tower you scale to fix your sonic, or the ring of… More
We all know the importance of soil as a CO2 source to the atmosphere, even in high latitude/altitude ecosystems with persistent snow cover. Before the days of automated soil respiration chambers and accessible eddy covariance technology, CO2 fluxes through porous media were estimated using vertical CO2 concentration profiles coupled with assumption that the vertical profile… More
To Be or Not to Be…that is the Question One of the challenging questions facing bio-geoscientists is whether the hydrological cycle is changing in a warming world with more CO2. There is speculation and evidence for both acceleration and a reduction in evaporation. The answer to this question is mixed as it is based on… More
The Rosemount AmeriFlux sites are located at the University of Minnesota, Rosemount Research and Outreach Center (RROC) – a 3,500 acre research farm (https://rroc.cfans.umn.edu/). Our eddy covariance sites were established in conventional corn/soy systems in the early 2000s to assess the long-term carbon balance of agricultural systems and to evaluate if practical strategies (i.e. cover… More
Thank you for attending the 2021 AmeriFlux Annual Meeting! All of you made possible a wonderful 3 day conference, in which we enjoyed catching up with colleagues, meeting new ones, and brainstorm new directions for high impact science around eddy covariance fluxes. We’d like to thank the speakers, panelists, breakout leads, poster presenters, and everyone… More
Congratulations to the several AmeriFlux community members who have been awarded DOE funding for eddy-covariance flux research! In total, $11 million in funding was announced “to Study Critical Ecosystems and Improve Climate and Earth System Modeling.” Notably, three of the PIs benefitted from the AmeriFlux support through the AmeriFlux Rapid-Response Flux System (RRS) program, the… More