In this webinar, we will hear from Gabriela Posse from Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA/Argentina), and Hinsby Cadillo-Quiroz from Arizona State University on flux research in Latin America.

Register for this webinar: https://lbnl.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUodOmsrD4tGdWMMAHdol3-oUuPGc3GoKH0

About the speakers ***

Gabriela Posse has a Degree in Biological Sciences and a Ph.D. from the University of Buenos Aires, with an orientation in Ecology. She has been working at the Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA) since 2001 as a Researcher in the Remote Sensing area of the Climate and Water Institute. Her areas of interest are related to the impact of agricultural activities on the environment, meteorological conditions on vegetation dynamics, carbon balances in the soil, fragmentation of environments, and effects of global change. She coordinated several projects to monitor greenhouse gas emissions resulting from agricultural activities.

Title: CO2 fluxes in agroecosystems of Argentina

In Argentina, agricultural production is very relevant, since agriculture contributes around 60% of the total exports. In addition, INTA is a public institution whose objectives include conducting and centralizing research on agricultural technology and rural development. With the aim of characterizing the functioning of our main agroecosystems, we use the Eddy Covariance technique among other methods. In this way we want to determine if they function as a carbon source or sink. We also work on understanding how these dynamics are affected by the meteorological conditions and the anthropic management in these systems. We initially compared these dynamics in a natural dry forest, in a commercial afforestation and in agriculture paddocks. We are currently focused on comparing the dynamics on two very close sites: one in an agricultural site (where we started the measurements in 2012) vs. other on a pasture with cattle grazing (since 2018). Although the agricultural site seems to behave as a carbon source (taking into account the carbon exported on harvest), a model generated for the region using satellite data and grain yield information shows that, on average, the agricultural sites have a net balance of in favor of carbon accumulation in the soil.

Hinsby Cadillo–Quiroz is a microbial ecologist and enthusiast of understanding GHG fluxes in various ecosystems. He has a PhD in Microbiology with a minor in Ecology from Cornell University. He and his research team investigate whether microbe-mediated organismal and environmental interactions drive ecosystem processes, particularly carbon cycling. His team is also examining how the environment, in turn, affects the evolution of microorganisms. With significant focus on methane-producing Archaea, Hinsby has studied northern peatlands, deserts and desert crusts, marine aggregates, anoxic bioreactors, landfills, natural and artificial wetlands, lakes and ponds, and over the last few years Amazon peatlands. His current work in the Amazon includes collaborative efforts to understand forest dynamics at plot scale, hydrology and effects on geochemistry, microbial distribution and community dynamics, metagenomics, as well intensive monitoring of GHG fluxes from soils and vegetation.

Title: Methane fluxes in Amazon peatlands: addressing their many unknowns through collaborations

Peatlands in the Amazon were unknown to the scientific world a short time ago, they were rare anecdotal accounts that, however, overlapped with regions estimated with highest methane emission in the world. The discovery of large swaths of land (over 175,000 km2) holding diverse peatlands in the Amazon, have shown that peatlands develop under various geomorphic, vegetation, geochemistry and soil conditions. Little is known about the magnitude and dynamics of greenhouse gasses (GHG), particularly methane, and even less about their controls. In this presentation, I will focus on results from different projects assessing the connections of microbial processes, geochemistry, carbon stocks and methane fluxes in Amazon peatlands. These results are the fruit of collaborative efforts involving geochemistry, microbial, and forestry evaluations in connection with field explorations and multi-institutional support. Results show that methane emissions are highly variable across sites in a manner related to site geochemistry as a predictor of “order of magnitude” emissions and microbial make up. Hydrology is the stronger predictor of seasonal variation. The role of primary productivity, however, is more complex than expected for soil flux. The role of stems as conduct for methane emission is significantly high showing one of the highest changes in values of stem emission detected on wetlands from low rain to flood seasons in forested peatlands. Further collaborative monitoring is badly needed in the region.

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More information: https://fluxnet.org/community/fluxnet-seminar-series/

Contact us at: fluxnet-seminar-series@fluxdata.org

Friday, April 22nd, 9am PDT | 12pm EST | 5pm London | 1am (Sat, Apr 23rd) Tokyo