From a dry vantage point on Twitchell Island, the deck of a cargo ship skims by, above a fragile levee that holds back the mighty San Joaquin River. A few centuries ago, standing in this same spot, we would have been covered in ten or twenty feet of peat, the residue from millennia of accumulating… More
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North of Boston lies the Great Marsh, the largest remaining complex of salt marshes in New England. Here, the Plum Island Ecosystems LTER is studying long-term changes in coastal ecosystems, particularly those due to an acceleration in sea level rise. In contrast to most southern marshes, the Great Marsh is currently dominated by Spartina patens… More
Tucked away on the remote Seward Peninsula in the far west of Alaska lays the Arctic outpost for the Department of Energy’s Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment (NGEE-Arctic) and its associated AmeriFlux site (US-NGC). During the summer months each year, when US-NGC is accessible by road, blueberries fruit across the surrounding tundra and river valleys, attracting… More
The inhibition of leaf respiration in the light has long been reported at a leaf scale, but recent isotopic evidence suggests that inhibition also occurs at the ecosystem scale. This is important, as inhibition at the ecosystem scale would imply a significant bias in current estimates of ecosystem photosynthesis and respiration, but it is not known… More
Until recently it was assumed that all exchange of methane between forests and the atmosphere takes place at the soil surface, and can be captured by an understory eddy covariance (EC) system. Based on a comprehensive review just published in New Phytologist, it is now clear that all surfaces in a forest—living wood, dead wood,… More
While many people in the AmeriFlux community may be familiar with rice and methane emissions, most are usually surprised by the connection rice has to the state of Arkansas, which accounts for about half of U.S. rice production. Rice fields in Arkansas are concentrated in the eastern part of the state on the Mississippi River’s… More
Around midnight on Oct 24, while Dennis Baldocchi was sleepily re-deriving the conservation of mass equation, the AmeriFlux website released a major methane bubble and published the brand new (odorless) web presence for AmeriFlux’s first Action Theme Year—the Year of Methane! You can check out the Year of Methane objectives, projects, and collaborating partners, which… More
Thanks to all who attended the 2018 AmeriFlux Data-Tech Workshop and PI Meeting in Bloomington, Indiana. A special thanks to Kim Novick and team for their outstanding hospitality. All of you contributed to making these events a great success. Presentations available now! The AmeriFlux Data and Tech Workshop presentations are now available. The 2018 AmeriFlux… More
The AmeriFlux Tech Team has completed another successful site visit season. This year they visited nine AmeriFlux sites. The below gallery features an image from each site visit. The Tech Team is planning for the upcoming site visit season. If you would like to learn more about site visits and what to expect, please see our… More
Guest blog! The Application for Extracting and Exploring Analysis Ready Samples (AppEEARS) is an online web application that lets users access and visualize geospatial data from various federal data archives, simply and efficiently. Let’s highlight an example of a simple AppEEARS point sample request for 25 Ameriflux sites located across Canada. We select sites listed… More