New special issue “OzFlux: a network for the study of ecosystem carbon and water dynamics across Australia and New Zealand”
TERN OzFlux is a national ecosystem research network set up to provide the Australian and global ecosystem modelling communities with nationally consistent observations of energy, carbon and water exchange between the atmosphere and key Australian ecosystems. TERN OzFlux is part of an international network of over 500 flux stations that is designed to provide continuous, long-term micrometeorological measurements to monitor the state of ecosystems globally.
OzFlux has recently published a special issue (SI) in Biogeosciences. In this special issue, the authors discuss the wide field of research to which the Australian and New Zealand flux network makes significant contributions. These areas include methodological aspects of observations and their interpretation; upscaling ecosystem-scale measurements to regional and larger scales using remote sensing and physical modelling; and analysis of carbon, water and energy cycles in response to land use and climate change, extreme weather and disturbance.
Natural fluxes must be measured to better understand land-climate interactions, feedbacks, and climate regulation. Research advances by the OzFlux community have led to improved, systematic, process-oriented computation of their data streams. In the SI, these data are used to derive a better understanding of the sink strength of key Australian and New Zealand ecosystems, how this sink strength varies over time and how vulnerable carbon sinks are to changes in climate and during extreme weather conditions.
Global land carbon sink anomaly of 2011 (Trudinger et al., 2016)
Moreover, Sink strength of ecosystems is also changed through disturbance and changes in land use. The SI shows that understanding how agricultural and forestry practice impact on those fluxes can enable better management practices.
OzFlux data were also critical to answer what determines the amount of tree cover in Australia and what the effects of seasonal variations in phenology on canopy, understory and ecosystem scales are on photosynthetic production.
Special Issue: “OzFlux: a network for the study of ecosystem carbon and water dynamics across Australia and New Zealand”. Eva van Gorsel, James Cleverly, Jason Beringer, Helen Cleugh, Derek Eamus, Lindsay B. Hutley, Peter Isaac, and Suzanne Prober, Biogeosciences, 15, 349-352, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-15-349-2018, 2018.
