Remote sensing of variables necessary to estimate net primary
production of vegetation over large temporal and spatial scales has been a
goal of climate change research. This thesis consists of two studies that
address the reliability of satellite and airborne sensors to quantify a basic
component of all production models,...
We analyzed 7 years (2002–2008) of micrometeorological and concurrent biological
observations of carbon and water fluxes at a mature ponderosa pine forest in central
Oregon in a semiarid climate. We sought to evaluate the extent that gross primary
productivity, net ecosystem exchange, ecosystem respiration, net primary productivity, net
ecosystem productivity,...
This study quantifies the short-term effects of low-, moderate-, and high-severity fire on carbon pools and fluxes in the Eastern Cascades of Oregon. We surveyed 64 forest stands across four fires that burned 41,000 ha (35%) of the Metolius Watershed in 2002 and 2003, stratifying the landscape by burn severity...
We present an inverse modeling framework designed to constrain CO2 budgets at regional scales. The approach captures atmospheric transport processes in high spatiotemporal resolution by coupling a mesoscale model with Lagrangian Stochastic backward trajectories. Terrestrial biosphere CO₂ emissions are generated through a simple diagnostic flux model that splits the net...
We present an atmospheric inverse modeling framework to constrain terrestrial biosphere CO₂ exchange processes at subregional scales. The model is operated at very high spatial and temporal resolution, using the state of Oregon in the northwestern United States as the model domain. The modeling framework includes mesoscale atmospheric simulations coupled...
Carbon sequestration is increasingly recognized as an ecosystem service, and forest management has a large potential to alter regional carbon fluxes − notably by way of harvest removals and related impacts on net ecosystem production (NEP). In the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S.,
the implementation of the Northwest Forest...
We propose the Breathing Earth System Simulator (BESS), an upscaling approach to quantify global gross primary productivity and evapotranspiration using MODIS with a spatial resolution of 1-5 km and a temporal resolution of 8 days. This effort is novel because it is the first system that harmonizes and utilizes MODIS...
The regular monitoring of evapotranspiration from satellites has been limited because of discontinuous temporal coverage, resulting in snapshots at a particular point in space and time. We developed a temporal upscaling scheme using satellite-derived instantaneous estimates of evapotranspiration to produce a daily-sum evapotranspiration averaged over an 8-day interval. We tested...
Two distinct nocturnal subcanopy flow regimes are observed beneath a tall (16 m) open pine forest canopy. The first is characterized by weaker mixing, stronger stability, westerly downslope flow decoupled from the flow above the canopy and much smaller than expected ecosystem respiration from the eddy flux plus storage measurements...
Five years of eddy-covariance and other measurements at a mature ponderosa pine forest and a nearby young plantation are used to contrast the carbon fluxes for long-term averages, seasonal patterns, diel patterns and interannual variability, and to examine the differing responses to water-stress. The mature forest with larger leaf area...