Identification

Title

Estimating soil respiration in a subalpine landscape using point, terrain, climate, and greenness data

Abstract

Landscape carbon (C) flux estimates help assess the ability of terrestrial ecosystems to buffer further increases in anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Advances in remote sensing have led to coarse-scale estimates of gross primary productivity (GPP; e.g., MODIS 17), yet efforts to develop spatial respiration products are lacking. Here we demonstrate a method to predict growing season soil respiration at a regional scale in a mixed subalpine ecosystem. We related field measurements (n=396) of growing season soil respiration mostly from subalpine forests in the Southern Rocky Mountains ecoregion to a suite of biophysical predictors using a Random Forest model (30-m pixel size). We found that Landsat Enhanced Vegetation Index, growing season aridity index, temperature, precipitation, elevation, and slope aspect explained spatiotemporal variability in soil respiration. Our model had a psuedo-r(2) of 0.45 and root-mean-square error of roughly one quarter of the mean value of respiration. Predicted growing season soil respiration across the region was remarkably consistent across 2004, 2005, and 2006 (150-day sums of 542.8, 544.3, and 536.5g C/m(2), respectively). Yet we observed substantial variability in spatial patterns of soil respiration predictions that varied among years, suggesting that our method is sensitive to changes in respiration drivers. Mean predicted growing season soil respiration was 73% of MODIS GPP, while predicted soil respiration was generally within 20% of nocturnal net ecosystem exchange from nearby eddy covariance towers. Thus, geospatial and remotely sensed data sets can be used to estimate soil respiration at landscape scales.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7125wmv

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2018-10-11T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact