New White Paper: An AmeriFlux Network perspective on urban and managed systems

Now posted in our Resources, the white paper, “An AmeriFlux network perspective on urban and managed systems,” brings  together expertise of the AmeriFlux community to identify gaps and offer recommendations to improve understanding of human-dominated and managed landscapes. It provides a brief review of socioeconomic, energy, water, ecological, and biogeochemical aspects of human-dominated ecosystems, and highlights the value of collecting observations from gradients that span urban/suburban, managed, and relatively unmanaged ecosystems, in different geographical areas and socioeconomic conditions.

Contributors (alphabetical): Gil Bohrer (Ohio State University), Lianhong Gu (Oak Ridge National Laboratory), Kevin Gurney (Arizona State University), Beverly Law (Oregon State University), Joseph McFadden (University of California, Santa Barbara), Asko Noormets (North Carolina State University), Eric Pardyjak (University of Utah), Cristina Poindexter (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), Rob Stoll (University of Utah), Margaret S. Torn (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory). Thanks to all of these people for swiftly and efficiently composing this white paper.

This paper was prepared in response to a request by James Ehleringer and Anthony Janetos for a BERAC-led workshop to be held in Germantown, Maryland, January 29-30, 2015. The workshop explored science questions related to the potential development of an Integrated Field Laboratory (IFL) with a focus on urban and managed systems. You can read more about this charge in BER Virtual Laboratory: Innovative Framework for Biological and Environmental Grand Challenges; A Report from the Biological and Environmental Research Advisory Committee (DOE/SC-0156; see http://science.energy.gov/ber/berac/reports/).