Field Lab — EOS IDS abstract 1999

Principal Investigator:

Christopher B. Field

Dept. of Plant Biology

Carnegie Institution of Washington

260 Panama Street

Stanford, CA 94305

650 325 1521 x 213

cfield@globalecology.stanford.edu

Co-Investigators:

Gregory P. Asner (University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309; 650 725 0927)

Ruth S. DeFries (University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-8225; 301 405-4884)

A. Scott Denning (Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1371; 970 491 6936)

Inez Y Fung (University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720; 510 943 9367)

Richard A. Houghton (Woods Hole Res. Center, Woods Hole, MA 02543; 508 540 9900)

James T. Randerson (California Inst. of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125; 626 395 6111)

Abstract

This is a proposal to integrate a number of complementary approaches to understanding current sources and sinks of carbon in the terrestrial biosphere. By merging information on carbon sources and sinks related to land use change, CO2 fertilization, N fertilization, fire suppression, and climate variability, we will assemble the elements necessary to test hypotheses about the role of each and the way those roles have changed through time.

The project's goals are structured into two tiers. The goal for the first tier is expanding the range of mechanisms that can be simulated with a spatially-explicit, process-based biogeochemistry model. The centerpiece of this effort will focus on linking satellite and historical databases on land use change. We will use the satellite data to provide the spatial detail and the historical data to provide both a longer time horizon and estimates of the fluxes directly connected to the human actions.

The goal on the second tier is to partition the current terrestrial carbon sink into components due to each of the potential mechanisms, using a combination of atmospheric inversions and terrestrial data. Our approach will attempt to quantify the fluxes associated with each mechanism, based on differences in the spatial and temporal signatures. Testing the entire suite of candidate mechanisms against many years of data for atmospheric CO2, 13C in CO2, and O2/N2 will provide a novel and, hopefully, powerful approach to unraveling the terrestrial carbon cycle.

This project will involve close collaborations with other IDS proposals focused on atmosphere/biosphere interactions (Fung), remote sensing of wildfire (Randerson), and remote sensing science (Ustin).