OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY

Projects

AmeriFlux

The Metolius cluster is composed of two research sites: the Metolius Mature Pine site (US-Me2)and the Metolius Young Pine site (US-Me6) . The research sites have multi-components of flux observations including the above-canopy flux system, sub-canopy flux systems, CO2 concentration...

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TERRA-PNW

Our primary goal is to understand the interactions and the feedbacks by which human decisions and forest ecosystems influence each other. We are using the Community Land Model (CLM) to predict tree mortality due to droughts, fires, and insect attacks. We also focus our efforts on the coupling between CLM and economic models to elucidate the interactions and feedbacks among climate, tree mortality, and economic factors. To our knowledge, this work represents the first effort to couple state-...

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DOE/USDA
PIs: B.E. Law, A. Schmidt, C. Still, T. Hilker

Land management strategies and land use within urban-suburban, agricultural and forested landscapes can have significant impacts on local and regional carbon, water and energy cycles, but their gross and net effects are complex and not well understood. As a result, a better understanding of the interactions and feedbacks between ecological systems, human actions, and changes in climate is...

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Past Projects

Nations of the world face challenges in developing sound policies and directions for addressing global change. The scientific community has the responsibility to provide the scientific basis for those policies. This includes developing the understanding of the influence of land, ocean and atmospheric processes in climate change. The goal of AmeriFlux is to develop a coordinated research network of long-term flux sites in the Americas for quantifying and understanding the role of the...

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AmeriFlux is a network of 92 long-term research sites across North America measuring the exchange of water vapor, sensible heat, and carbon fluxes between the atmosphere and biosphere using the eddy covariance technique. As with every precision measurement endeavor, there are sources of systematic and random error resulting from variances in hardware, software, and the instrument installation. To reduce and quantify these uncertainties, the AmeriFlux quality assurance and quality control (QA...

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Synthesis of Remote Sensing and Field Observations to Model and Understand Disturbance and Climate Effects on the Carbon Balance of Oregon and Northern California

The project tests and demonstrates the bottom-up and top-down paradigm of the North American Carbon Program. To quantify and understand the carbon budgets of Oregon and northern California (Figure 2), a spatially nested hierarchy of field and satellite remote sensing observations is combined with a widely-used prognostic...

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The possibility of global, three-dimensional remote sensing of forest structure with interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) bears on important forest ecological processes, particularly the carbon cycle. InSAR supplements two-dimensional remote sensing with information in the verticaldimension. Its strengths in potential for global coverage complement those of lidar, which has the potential for high accuracy vertical profiles over small areas. InSAR derives its sensitivity to forest...

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Influence of Climate Variability on the Productivity and Distribution of Ponderosa Pine Ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest: Combination of a Process-Based Model and a 102-Year High Resolution Climate Data Set.

Regional Analyis of CO2 and H2O Exchange Over Heterogenous Terrain

Funding provided by NASA

Investigators: Larry Mahrt, Bev Law, and Mathew Williams

Investigating carbon, vegetation and wildlife dynamics on the Biscuit: effects of wildfire, reburn and post-fire logging

The annual exchange of CO2 between forests and the atmosphere can be profoundly affected by wildfire, especially in regions like the Pacific Northwest where forest biomass potential is relatively high. The pulse of carbon released to the atmosphere by large-scale fire events such as the Biscuit may reduce the net annual uptake of carbon by Oregon forests by as much...

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