New paper from our project FEVER now published in the journal of Weather and Climate Extremes shows increasing air temperatures lead to drier air & soil, impacting ecosystems & climate modulation. We observed across Europe a 1.2x increase in extreme dryness from 1991-2021, with projections under RCP8.5 suggesting a 4.6x rise by late-21st century! Read the full paper here.
Happy International Women´s Day from the Biosphere-Atmosphere Interaction group! Read an interview of ICOS-RI with Mana Gharun, re-posted from last year:
https://www.icos-cp.eu/event/1280
New paper from our project FEVER, and led by Ankit Shekhar is now published in Science of the Total Environment. Using long-term ecosystem-level carbon and water flux measurements, and long-term tree-level dendrometer and sapflow measurements we show that in the context of drought response, it matters to assess soil or atmospheric drought, because forests respond differently to these or their compounds.
We have now added a CH4 analyzer to the eddy covariance system at our ICOS candidate flux station Amtsvenn-Hündfelder Moor. We are very happy to see the very first set of measurements! Thanks especially to the group of Prof Otto Klemm for lending us their methane analyzer!
At the 21st Swiss Geoscience Meeting this year Luana Krebs presented very nice results from the second study of her PhD thesis"25 years of net ecosystem CO2 exchange in a subalpine spruce forest". Great job Luana!
Today we close the first annual carbon budget for our recently established peatland eddy covariance station Amtsvenn (DE-Amv). The peatland has emitted 158 gC/m2 in one year (between October 2022 and October 2023).
Maintaining continuous high quality flux measurements are hard work but extremely necessary for determining the role ecosystems as carbon sinks or sources, and making informed decisions about land use, conservation, restoration, and climate change mitigation strategies.
Co-optimization of CO2 uptake and albedo effects enhances impact of forests on cooling the climate. How? Find out in our recent study now published in Communications Earth & Environment.
Spring 2020 lockdown due to COVID-19 pandemic led to reduced air pollution across Europe. In a recent study now published in the Science of Total Environment we explored how this reduced emission of pollutants affected radiation and consequently plant productivity across ecosystems in Europe.
A warm welcome to Giorgos Xanthopoulos, PhD candidate from Democritus University of Thrace , who is visiting our group on a Short-Term Scientific Mission (STSM) within CLEANFOREST Cost Action project. The PhD project of Giorgos is about measuring and understanding carbon and water dynamics of natural Aleppo pine ecosystems.
"How is climate change affecting the ecosystem functioning and biosphere-atmopshere interaction processes in mountain ecosystems?" This was the topic of a 5-day excursion to the Swiss Alps, offered for the first time by the Biosphere-Atmosphere Interaction group. During this excursion students hiked up to forest and grassland ecosystems along elevation gradients, visited long-term monitoring sites and transplant experiments, and collected their own measurements.
We are happy to announce that our newly established eddy covariance station in Amstvenn-Hündfelder Moor will join the network of ICOS RI, the steering committee of ICOS Germany has informed us! ICOS RI is the Integrated Carbon Observation Network Research Infrastructure that generates standardized, high-precision, long-term observations of the carbon cycle with the aim to reduce uncertainties in corresponding model predictions, to warn of negative developments at an early stage and to initiate adaptation measures in time, and to evaluate the success of climate protection measures.
The labelling process for Amtsvenn will start in January 2024!
Increased intensity and frequency of atmospheric dryness is not changing the resistance of forests to drought in terms of net ecosystem productivity! Read our latest paper led by PhD student Ankit Shekhar published now in Global Change Biology.
Congratuations to Ankit Shekhar for successfully defending his doctoral thesis on forest vulnerability to extreme dryness. Visit Ankit´s list of publications to find out more what he has been working on during his PhD.
The first annual meeting of the COST Action project CLEANFOREST took place in Thessaloniki, Greece, with +80 particiapnts. The BAI group is co-leading the third working group on interactions between global change drivers and tree and soil biogeochemical processes and is looking forwared to fruitful collaborations over the next coming years!
This year at EGU2023 in Vienna, Nicolas Behrens presented what he has been working on over the past 8 months of his PhD project and had fruitful discussions. The title of Nicolas´ presentation was: Disentangling biotic and abiotic drivers of CO2 flux in a drained German peatland using eddy covariance flux measurements and modelling techniques.
The 2-days workshop on "Ecosystem-Atmosphere Interactions and Nature-Based Climate Solutions" organized by the Eco-Meteorology group at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena was an exciting opportunity to present our research and discuss scientific ideas and developments across a range of ecosystem types relevant for mitigating climate change.
Happy to announce that this year (also) we will have a session focused on “Novel methods for bridging process-based and data-driven modelling of carbon, energy, and water fluxes from leaf to continental scales” at EGU2023 in Vienna, Austria.
This session will take place on 27-28 April, with many exciting presentations and a keynote by Prof. Dr. Christiane Werner from the University of Freiburg.
Surfaces soil of 48% of global vegetated area has dried over the past 40 years! Find out more in our recent study now published in Science of the Total Environment.
The Biosphere-Atmosphere Interaction group welcomes Visweshwar Arulmozhi Nambi who will be working on his MSc thesis project "Assessment of structural and topographic influences on greenhouse gas flux observations using a footprint model and LIDAR measurements in a peatland ecosystem". The project is an exciting collaboration between Institute of Landscape Ecology and Institute for Geoinformatics.
Wondering how well do solar-induced fluorescence (SIF) products explain global terrestrial gross primary productivity (GPP)? Find out in our latest study published now in the Remote Sensing of Environment journal.
The first eddy covariance flux tower of the group of Biosphere-Atmosphere Interaction was successfully installed in the Amtsvenn-Hündfelder Moor in September. We are looking forward to collecting exciting greenhouse gas flux measurements from this relevant ecosystem, educating students, and extending our collaborations with the national and international community!
Congratulations to Nicolas Behrens for officially starting his PhD at the BAI research group. Over the next 3 years Nicolas will be working on measuring and understanding greenhouse gas emissions from peatlands. Welcome Nicolas!
How do forests modulate soil water storage during severe drought? Read our recent study led by Katrin Meusburger at WSL now published in Global Change Biology!
It was great being back at EGU and this time in person! We had a great session thanks to our fantastic speakers and a great audience. Looking forward to continuing our discussions on challenges that scaling carbon and water fluxes entail.
Congratulations to my M.Sc. student Capucine Marion for successfuly submitting her thesis on "Measuring Dissolved Gases in Tree Xylem Sap" at ETH Zürich. Capucine will be presenting results of her M.Sc. research project at the next Goldschmidt 2022 Conference in Hawaiʻi, USA. Well done Capucine!
The 5th ICOS Science Conference takes place in Utrecht Netherlands 13-15 September 2022 The overarching theme of the conference is "Tracking progress to carbon neutrality”. If you are interested in climate extremes and greenhouse gas emissions the Biosphere-Atmosphere Interaction group invites you to submit your abstract to our session G.2. Abstract submission deadline is 11 April 2022 at 11.00 am CET.
Field visit to Amtsvenn peatland to evaluate the site for setting up a new eddy covariance measurement station. Our plan is to quantify emissions and uptake of greenhouse gases in a system-based approach and in collaboration with several other working groups within ILÖK as part of an interdisciplinary research project.
