Upscaled diurnal cycles of land–atmosphere fluxes: a new global half-hourly data product

Interactions between the biosphere and the atmosphere can be well characterized by fluxes between the two. In particular, carbon and energy fluxes play a major role in understanding biogeochemical processes on an ecosystem level or global scale. However, the fluxes can only be measured at individual sites, e.g., by eddy covariance towers, and an upscaling of these local observations is required to analyze global patterns. Previous work focused on upscaling monthly, 8-day, or daily average values, and global maps for each flux have been provided accordingly. In this paper, we raise the upscaling of carbon and energy fluxes between land and atmosphere to the next level by increasing the temporal resolution to subdaily timescales. We provide continuous half-hourly fluxes for the period from 2001 to 2014 at 0.5° spatial resolution, which allows for analyzing diurnal cycles globally. The data set contains four fluxes: gross primary production (GPP), net ecosystem exchange (NEE), latent heat (LE), and sensible heat (H). We propose two prediction approaches for the diurnal cycles based on large-scale regression models and compare them in extensive cross-validation experiments using different sets of predictor variables. We analyze the results for a set of FLUXNET tower sites showing the suitability of our approaches for this upscaling task. Finally, we have selected one approach to calculate the global half-hourly data products based on predictor variables from remote sensing and meteorology at daily resolution as well as half-hourly potential radiation. In addition, we provide a derived product that only contains monthly average diurnal cycles, which is a lightweight version in terms of data storage that still allows studying the important characteristics of diurnal patterns globally. We recommend to primarily use these monthly average diurnal cycles, because they are less affected by the impacts of day-to-day variation, observation noise, and short-term fluctuations on subdaily timescales compared to the full half-hourly flux products. The global half-hourly data products are available at https://doi.org/10.17871/BACI.224.</p

Towards a multisensor station for automated biodiversity monitoring

Rapid changes of the biosphere observed in recent years are caused by both small and large scale drivers, like shifts in temperature, transformations in land-use, or changes in the energy budget of systems. While the latter processes are easily quantifiable, documentation of the loss of biodiversity and community structure is more difficult. Changes in organismal abundance and diversity are barely documented. Censuses of species are usually fragmentary and inferred by often spatially, temporally and ecologically unsatisfactory simple species lists for individual study sites. Thus, detrimental global processes and their drivers often remain unrevealed. A major impediment to monitoring species diversity is the lack of human taxonomic expertise that is implicitly required for large-scale and fine-grained assessments. Another is the large amount of personnel and associated costs needed to cover large scales, or the inaccessibility of remote but nonetheless affected areas. To overcome these limitations we propose a network of Automated Multisensor stations for Monitoring of species Diversity (AMMODs) to pave the way for a new generation of biodiversity assessment centers. This network combines cutting-edge technologies with biodiversity informatics and expert systems that conserve expert knowledge. Each AMMOD station combines autonomous samplers for insects, pollen and spores, audio recorders for vocalizing animals, sensors for volatile organic compounds emitted by plants (pVOCs) and camera traps for mammals and small invertebrates. AMMODs are largely self-containing and have the ability to pre-process data (e.g. for noise filtering) prior to transmission to receiver stations for storage, integration and analyses. Installation on sites that are difficult to access require a sophisticated and challenging system design with optimum balance between power requirements, bandwidth for data transmission, required service, and operation under all environmental conditions for years. An important prerequisite for automated species identification are databases of DNA barcodes, animal sounds, for pVOCs, and images used as training data for automated species identification. AMMOD stations thus become a key component to advance the field of biodiversity monitoring for research and policy by delivering biodiversity data at an unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. (C) 2022 Published by Elsevier GmbH on behalf of Gesellschaft fur Okologie

Earth system data cubes unravel global multivariate dynamics

Understanding Earth system dynamics in light of ongoing human intervention and dependency remains a major scientific challenge. The unprecedented availability of data streams describing different facets of the Earth now offers fundamentally new avenues to address this quest. However, several practical hurdles, especially the lack of data interoperability, limit the joint potential of these data streams. Today, many initiatives within and beyond the Earth system sciences are exploring new approaches to overcome these hurdles and meet the growing interdisciplinary need for data-intensive research; using data cubes is one promising avenue. Here, we introduce the concept of Earth system data cubes and how to operate on them in a formal way. The idea is that treating multiple data dimensions, such as spatial, temporal, variable, frequency, and other grids alike, allows effective application of user-defined functions to co-interpret Earth observations and/or model- data integration. An implementation of this concept combines analysis-ready data cubes with a suitable analytic interface. In three case studies, we demonstrate how the concept and its implementation facilitate the execution of complex workflows for research across multiple variables, and spatial and temporal scales: (1) summary statistics for ecosystem and climate dynamics; (2) intrinsic dimensionality analysis on multiple timescales; and (3) model-data integration. We discuss the emerging perspectives for investigating global interacting and coupled phenomena in observed or simulated data. In particular, we see many emerging perspectives of this approach for interpreting large-scale model ensembles. The latest developments in machine learning, causal inference, and model-data integration can be seamlessly implemented in the proposed framework, supporting rapid progress in data-intensive research across disciplinary boundaries

Improved tree-ring archives will support earth-system science

A steep decline in archiving could make large tree-ring datasets irrelevant. But increased spatiotemporal coverage, the addition of novel parameters at sub-annual resolution, and integration with other in situ and remote Earth observations will elevate tree-ring data as an essential component of global-change research

Large-scale Gaussian process inference with generalized histogram intersection kernels for visual recognition tasks

We present new methods for fast Gaussian process (GP) inference in large-scale scenarios including exact multi-class classification with label regression, hyperparameter optimization, and uncertainty prediction. In contrast to previous approaches, we use a full Gaussian process model without sparse approximation techniques. Our methods are based on exploiting generalized histogram intersection kernels and their fast kernel multiplications. We empirically validate the suitability of our techniques in a wide range of scenarios with tens of thousands of examples. Whereas plain GP models are intractable due to both memory consumption and computation time in these settings, our results show that exact inference can indeed be done efficiently. In consequence, we enable every important piece of the Gaussian process framework—learning, inference, hyperparameter optimization, variance estimation, and online learning—to be used in realistic scenarios with more than a handful of data

Upscaled diurnal cycles of land-atmosphere fluxes: a new global half-hourly data product

Interactions between the biosphere and the atmosphere can be well characterized by fluxes between the two. In particular, carbon and energy fluxes play a major role in understanding biogeochemical processes on an ecosystem level or global scale. However, the fluxes can only be measured at individual sites, e.g., by eddy covariance towers, and an upscaling of these local observations is required to analyze global patterns. Previous work focused on upscaling monthly, 8-day, or daily average values, and global maps for each flux have been provided accordingly. In this paper, we raise the upscaling of carbon and energy fluxes between land and atmosphere to the next level by increasing the temporal resolution to subdaily timescales.We provide continuous half-hourly fluxes for the period from 2001 to 2014 at 0:5 spatial resolution, which allows for analyzing diurnal cycles globally. The data set contains four fluxes: gross primary production (GPP), net ecosystem exchange (NEE), latent heat (LE), and sensible heat (H). We propose two prediction approaches for the diurnal cycles based on large-scale regression models and compare them in extensive cross-validation experiments using different sets of predictor variables. We analyze the results for a set of FLUXNET tower sites showing the suitability of our approaches for this upscaling task. Finally, we have selected one approach to calculate the global half-hourly data products based on predictor variables from remote sensing and meteorology at daily resolution as well as half-hourly potential radiation. In addition, we provide a derived product that only contains monthly average diurnal cycles, which is a lightweight version in terms of data storage that still allows studying the important characteristics of diurnal patterns globally. We recommend to primarily use these monthly average diurnal cycles, because they are less affected by the impacts of day-to-day variation, observation noise, and short-term fluctuations on subdaily timescales compared to the full half-hourly flux products. The global half-hourly data products are available at https://doi.org/10.17871/BACI.224

SMOS vegetation optical depth and ecosystem functional properties: Exploring their relationships in tropical forests

Data from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission were exploited to explore its potential in providing ecosystem information. Here the strength of an innovative relationship, between SMOS V620 algorithm data and Ecosystem Functional Properties (EFPs) derived from flux towers data, was preliminary investigated for Africa and South America forests. Correlation was also explored for above ground forest biomass. High correlation values were found between SMOS vegetation optical depth (VOD) and a AGB reference map, and with EFPs at year level (2014). Different VOD-EFPs trends were found for different latitudinal belts, characterizing wet and dry forests. The results suggest that SMOS VOD data represent a tool able to provide repeated information on forest biomass and forest processes in tropical and subtropical ranges

Ranking drivers of global carbon and energy fluxes over land

The accurate estimation of carbon and heat fluxes at global scale is paramount for future policy decisions in the context of global climate change. This paper analyzes the relative relevance of potential remote sensing and meteorological drivers of global carbon and energy fluxes over land. The study is done in an indirect way via upscaling both Gross Primary Production (GPP) and latent energy (LE) using Gaussian Process regression (GPR). In summary, GPR is successfully compared to multivariate linear regression (RMSE gain of +4.17% in GPP and +7.63% in LE) and kernel ridge regression (+2.91% in GPP and +3.07% in LE). The best GP models are then studied in terms of explanatory power based on the analysis of the lengthscales of the anisotropic covariance function, sensitivity maps of the predictive mean, and the robustness to distortions in the input variables. It is concluded that GPP is predominantly mediated by several vegetation indices and land surface temperature (LST), while LE is mostly driven by LST, global radiation and vegetation indices