Arctic nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions have long been assumed to have a negligible climatic impact
but recently increasing evidence has emerged of N2O hotspots in the Arctic. Even in small
amounts, N2O has the potential to contribute to climate change due to it being nearly 300 times
more potent at radiative forcing than CO2. Therefore, the ‘NOCA’ project aims to establish the first
circumarctic N2O budget. Following intensive N2O flux sampling campaigns at primary sites within
Northern Russia and soil N2O concentration measurements from secondary sites across the
Arctic, we are now entering the phase of spatial extrapolation. Challenges to overcome are the
small-scale heterogeneity of the landscape and incorporating small features that can function as
N2O hotspots. Therefore, as a first step in upscaling the N2O fluxes, high resolution imagery is
needed. We show here novel high-resolution 3D imagery from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV),
which will be used to upscale N2O fluxes from plot to landscape scale by linking ground-truth N2O
measurements to vegetation maps. This approach will first be applied to the East cliff of
Kurungnakh Island in the Lena River Delta of North Siberia and is based on 2019 sampling
campaign data. Kurungnakh Island is characterized by ice and organic-rich Yedoma permafrost
that is thawed by fluvial thermo-erosion forming retrogressive thaw slumps in various stages of
activity. Overall, 20 sites were sampled along the cliff and inland, covering the significant
topographic and vegetative characteristics of the landscape. The data from this scale will provide
the basis for extrapolating, by using a stepwise upscaling approach, to the regional and finally
circumarctic scale, allowing a first rough estimate of the current climate impact of N2O emissions
from permafrost affected soils. Available international circumarctic data from this and past projects
will be synthesized with an Arctic N2O database under development for use in future ecosystem
and process-based climate model simulation
