News 2015

Meetings

The Biometlab was well represented at AGU. Here is list of papers and posters

B51A-0402 A New and Improved Carbon Dioxide Isotope Analyzer for Understanding Soil-Plant-Atmosphere Interactions

B21H-0573 Beyond the Methanogenic Black-Box: Greenhouse Gas Fluxes as Evidence for Wetlands as Dynamic Redox Systems

B42A-04 Detection of Extreme Climate Event Impacts to Terrestrial Productivity From Airborne Hyperspectral Imagery

B24B-02 Flux everywhere, all of the time?

B33C-0702 Greenhouse gas emissions and carbon sequestration potential in restored freshwater marshes in the Sacramento San-Joaquin Delta, California

A33H-0288 Impact of Air Pollution on California Central Valley Fog Frequency

B34A-01 Multifaceted Roles of Management on Land-Atmosphere Interactions

H31J-04 Scale – dependent effects on the surface energy fluxes modelling in heterogeneous/complex ecosystems using the Two-Source Energy Balance (TSEB)

B32A-01 Subcanopy Flux Measurements in Forest Ecosystems

TH43H  The AmeriFlux Network: Celebrating Its 20th Anniversary

B42A-08 The NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) Mission Level 4 Carbon Product calibration and validation using eddy covariance observations across North America, Australia and Finland

B54D-02 the Role of Species, Structure, and Biochemical Traits in the Spatial Distribution of a Woodland Community

B21I-06 Using eddy covariance of CO2 and CH4 continuous soil respiration measurements, and PhenoCams to constrain a process-based biogeochemical model for carbon market-funded wetland restoration

Publications

Sturtevant et al. Identifying scale-emergent, non-linear, asynchronous processes of wetland methane exchange" [Paper #2015JG003054RR], for publication in Journal of Geophysical Research - Biogeosciences. In Press

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015JG003054/full

Research

We are conducting a field test of the new LGR COS sensor at Twitchell Island over a safflower field. This is a new sensor that uses a mid-IR quantum cascade laser.  The work is part of an SBIR project with LGR

Staff News

Elke Eichelmann has joined the biomet lab as a postdoctoral scientist. She recently earned her PhD from the University of Guelph in Canada. She will add to the team of scientists studying greenhouse gas exchange of the mesonetwork in the Delta

Visitors

Werner Kurz from Canadian Forest Serviced visited and discussed forest carbon inventories and climate change

Sebastian Wolf, ETH Zurich, is back in town before AGU

Michael Roderick, Australian National University, and Randall Donohue, CSIRO, visited and discussed drought in CA

Submissions

Operating Temperatures of Photosynthesis in North American Ecosystems: Adaptation and Acclimation by Ma, Siyan; Baldocchi, Dennis; Massman, William; Starr, Gregory ; Desai, Ankur R.; Bohrer, Gil; Yang, Bai; Barr, Jordan; Law, Beverly; Kolb, Thomas; Phillips, Rich; Verfaillie, Joseph Global Ecology and Biogeography (GEB-2015-0462)

 

Staff News

Kyle Hemes is a Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources as the Carbon Neutrality Initiative Presidential Fellow. Congratulations.

Submissions

Knox, Hatala, Sturtevant, Oikawa, Verfaillie, Baldocchi. Photosynthesis and soil temperature regulate interannual variability in ecosystem scale methane emissions from a California rice paddy. Journal of Geophysical Research, Biogeosciences, 

Sonia Wharton; Matthias Falk; Siyan Ma; Dennis D Baldocchi; Jennifer F Newman; Jessica L Osuna; Ken  Bible, Introducing the Use of Wind Lidar to Identify Above-Canopy Flow Phenomena at Three Distinct AmeriFlux Canopies: Case Studies for Interpreting Nighttime Ecosystem Carbon Measurements. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology

Baldocchi, D. Knox, S., Oikawa, P. Sturtevant, C., Verfailie, J, Dronova, I, Hatala-Mathes, J., Detto, M. The Impact of Expanding Flooded Land Area on the Annual Evaporation of Rice. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology

Visitors

Mike Goulden, UC Irvine and speaker at BASC seminar series

Elke Eichemann, Guelph, new hire as postdoc.

Publications

Pennypacker, S. and D. Baldocchi. 2015. Seeing the Fields and Forests: Application of Surface-Layer Theory and Flux-Tower Data to Calculating Vegetation Canopy Height. Boundary-Layer Meteorology:1-18.

 note: Sam did this work as an undergraduate. He is now a graduate student in the atmospheric science program at the University of Washington

Staff News

Ana Andreu Mendez is leaving to take a new position in Dresden Germany.

Institute for Integrated Management of Material Fluxes and of Resources (UNU-FLORES)

 We congratulate her on her new position.

Submissions

Farming carbon instead of corn: A biogeochemical model for carbon market-funded wetland restoration" by Oikawa, Patricia; Jenerette, G; Knox, Sara; Sturtevant, Cove; Verfaillie, Joseph; Dronova, Iryna; Poindexter, Christina; Baldocchi, Dennis,  Global Change Biology

Canopy and climate controls of gross primary production of deciduous and evergreen oak savannas under the Mediterranean climate" by Xiao, Xiangming; Wang, Jie; Ma, Siyan; Baldocchi, Dennis; Carrara, Arnaud; Wagle, Pradeep; Zhang, Yao; Dong, Jinwei; Qin, Yuanwei,  Global Change Biology.

Meetings

Patty Oikawa.Improving process-based modeling of CO2 and CH4 exchange from managed wetlands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta Ecological Society of America

D. Baldocchi. Scaling ecological data to reveal emergent properties of ecosystems. Ecological Society of America.

Publications

Matthes, J. H., S. H. Knox, C. Sturtevant, O. Sonnentag, J. Verfaillie, and D. Baldocchi. 2015. Predicting landscape-scale CO2 flux at a pasture and rice paddy with long-term hyperspectral canopy reflectance measurements. Biogeosciences 12:4577-4594.

Wagle, P., X. Xiao, R. L. Scott, T. E. Kolb, D. R. Cook, N. Brunsell, D. D. Baldocchi, J. Basara, R. Matamala, Y. Zhou, and R. Bajgain. 2015. Biophysical controls on carbon and water vapor fluxes across a grassland climatic gradient in the United States. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 214–215:293-305.

Staff News

Cove Sturtevant is moving to a new job at NEON in Boulder Colorado.  Cove worked for us for over 2 years and did first rate work modulizing the flux processing program and developing software to apply mutual information theory to our flux and meteorological datasets. We wish him Bon Voyage and good luck on the next stage of his career.

Kyle Hemes joins the Biomet lab as a new graduate student. Welcome Kyle. He will be involved in the Delta greenhouse gas flux measurement study over restored wetlands and ag fields.

Annual Lab Picnic at the 'Ranch' and Beach

Visitors

Manuel Helbig from University of Montreal. Manuel is a student of former postdoc, Oliver Sonnentag, and they are doing interesting work on greenhouse exchange from the thawing permafrost in the Northwest Territories over forested and tundra landscapes.

Meetings

Miguel Jimenez presented his work on measuring soil respiration and soil diffusivity at the Biological Scholars Program Undergraduate Symposium

ddd attended and lectured on Fluxnet, Lessons Learned at the 8th annual Flux Course at Niwot Ridge in Colorado #fluxcourse

Research

We are collaborating with LGR for 2 weeks measuring fluxes of 13C, C18O and C17O over alfalfa with their new tunable diode laser spectrometer. Exciting new data to help us better partition net CO2 fluxes into photosynthesis and respiration

Visitors

Ben Ruddell from Arizona State is visiting to discuss Information theory and its application to Fluxnet data and our tower flux data.

Xiangming Xiao from Oklahoma visited the rice and wetland field sites with Sara Knox.  Xiao and his team are interested in modeling rice CO2 and methane fluxes with remote sensing and using our data to validate and parameterize our their models

Paul Moorcroft from Harvard visited and gave a seminar on updates on the ED-2, ecosystem dynamic model. He is applying the model to ecosystems with seasonal water deficits and sparse canopies and testing it on Tonzi Ranch

Meetings

Annual Meeting of Society of Wetland Scientists, Providence, RI

Agricultural Peatland Restoration: Effects of Land-Use Change on Greenhouse Gas (CO2 and CH4) Fluxes in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Sara Knox, University of California, Berkeley

Improving Process-Based Modeling of CO2 and CH4 Exchange from Managed Wetlands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Patricia Oikawa, University of California - Berkeley

Alpine Shortcourse on Land-Atmosphere Interactions, Valsavaranche, Italy 

Other

The BiometLab is live on Twitter! @BerkeleyBiomet

Opinion Piece in SF Chronicle

California drought: charge true cost of agricultural water

(original title, Almonds: damned if you do, damned if you dont)

Staff News

Miguel Jimenez joined the Biomet Lab this summer as an undergraduate research supported by the Biological Scholars Program. Miguel will work on evaluating soil respiration of alfalfa with flux gradient and chamber methods.

Ana Andreu participated in the GRAPEX experiment in Lodi, hosted at the Gallo vineyard by the USDA group of Bill Kustas. This team was looking at ways to use drones and satellite remote sensing to estimate water use of the vineyard.

Submissions

Anderson, Frank, Brian Bergamaschi, Lisamarie Windham-Myers, Cove Sturtevant, Matteo Detto, Sara Knox,Jaclyn Matthes,Dennis Baldocchi,Joseph Verfaillie,Richard Louis Snyder,Lauren Hastings,Roger Fujii Variation of energy and carbon fluxes from a restored temperate freshwater wetland and implications for carbon market verification protocols.  Journal of Geophysical Research, Biogeosciences, submitted

Visitors

Sebastian Wolf, former postdoc, now at ETH Zurich, visited the Biomet Lab for 2 weeks

Meetings

Sara Knox spoke on the analysis of six years of rice methane fluxes at the monthly USDA-AFRI-UC Davis team meeting.

ddb gave an invited talk on 'What is Annual Ecosystem Photosynthesis? An Exploration of Data and Models from Ecosystem to Globe' at the 4th Carbon Assimilation Workshop at the University of Toronto. 

ddb spoke at the Antioch Sons of Italy on trends in fog in the Central Valley.  Learned about the release of hippos in the delta to control water hyacinth

Other

Almonds, Not the State's Worst Water Offenders NBC Bay Area

Proposals

A proposal with the Dept of Water Resources and the Silver Lab was funded by the California Dept Fish and Wildlife to restore wetlands that sequester greenhouse gases and provide other ecological benefits. The work will be done on Sherman Island and extend our network of sites across the Delta on Twitchell Island

https://cdfgnews.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/cdfw-awards-21-million-in-grants-for-greenhouse-gas-reduction-projects/

Publications

Baldocchi, D., Sturtevant, C. and Contributors., 2015. Does day and night sampling reduce spurious correlation between canopy photosynthesis and ecosystem respiration? Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 207(0): 117-126.

Submissions

Sturtevant, C., Ruddell, B., Knox, S., Verfaillie, J, Hatala-Mathes, J., Oikawa, P. Baldocchi, D. Identifying the complex processes driving greenhouse gas exchange at multiple time scales in restored wetlands. Journal of Geophysical Research, Biogeosciences, submitted.

Visitors

Trevor Keenan visited the Biomet lab, while on campus and in Berkeley giving a lecture at LBL.

Meetings

Patty Oikawa lectured on Transitioning from Farming Corn to Farming Carbon: The Role of Agriculture in Water Resources Management and Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation at Stanford, April 1, 2015

ddb lectured on 'Physics Wins, Biology is How it's Done: An Exploration of Ecosystem-Atmosphere Interactions' at University of Hawaii, Geography Distinguished Lecture Series. April 2, 2015 and at the Weizmann Institute in Israel on April 19. 2015.

ddb attend the DOE Terrestrial Ecosystem Science PI meeting in Potomac, MD and presented a poster on the mesonetwork of flux sites the biomet lab is operating across California.

Publications

Osuna, J.L., Baldocchi, D.D., Kobayashi, H. and Dawson, T.E., 2015. Seasonal trends in photosynthesis and electron transport during the Mediterranean summer drought in leaves of deciduous oaks. Tree Physiology.

Visitors

Gordon Bonan, from NCAR, visited while on campus giving his BASC lecture on Connecting mathematical ecosystems, real-world ecosystems, and climate science

Joana Joiner from NASA visited the biomet lab, while on campus giving her BASC lecture on detecting chlorophyll flourescence from space.

Meetings

ddb visited the Universities of Stockholm and Uppsala, where he gave presentations on greenhouse gas flux studies in the Delta.  The main purpose was to serve  as the opponent of the PhD defense of Eva Podgrajsek, Lake fluxes of carbon dioxide and methane. He also visited the new lake flux site on Lake Erken.  The Uppsala group of Erik Sahlee and Anna Rutgersson are actively measuring eddy fluxes over lakes in Sweden and the Baltic sea. The Stockholm group of Patrick Crill are doing novel work in the Arctic measuring methane fluxes of fens, bogs and lakes and are looking at the sources of production with stable isotopes and linking biogeochemical function with genomics, protenomics and transcriptonomics. They are also making novel measurements of bubble fluxes.  A Lot was learned on the trip.

 Joe Verfaillie, Cove Sturtevant, Siyan Ma, Patty Oikawa, Sara Knox, Housen Chu and Ana Andreu participated in the Ameriflux Data workshop at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

Publications

Baldocchi, D.D. Sturtevant, C. Does Day and Night Sampling Reduce Spurious Correlation between Canopy Photosynthesis and Ecosystem Respiration?&Agricultural and Forest Meteorology. accepted for publication

Petrescu, A. M. R., A. Lohila, J.-P. Tuovinen, D. D. Baldocchi, A. R. Desai, N. T. Roulet, T. Vesala, A. J. Dolman, W. C. Oechel, B. Marcolla, T. Friborg, J. Rinne, J. H. Matthes, L. Merbold, A. Meijide, G. Kiely, M. Sottocornola, T. Sachs, D. Zona, A. Varlagin, D. Y. F. Lai, E. Veenendaal, F.-J. W. Parmentier, U. Skiba, M. Lund, A. Hensen, J. van Huissteden, L. B. Flanagan, N. J. Shurpali, T. Grünwald, E. R. Humphreys, M. Jackowicz-Korczyński, M. A. Aurela, T. Laurila, C. Grüning, C. A. R. Corradi, A. P. Schrier-Uijl, T. R. Christensen, M. P. Tamstorf, M. Mastepanov, P. J. Martikainen, S. B. Verma, C. Bernhofer, and A. Cescatti. 2015. The uncertain climate footprint of wetlands under human pressure. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi 10.1073/pnas.1416267112. published online, early view

Visitors

Jose Fuentes of Penn State visited the Biometlab while on campus giving a BASC symposium lecture

Meetings

ddb gave a presentation on eddy covariance, a method for measuring ecosystem-atmosphere fluxes of trace gases at 2015 Aquatic Sciences meeting of the Association of the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography in Granada, Spain.

Presentations on the Fluxnet project were give at the Vrije University, near Amsterdam. While in Wageningen, seminars were given on the greenhouse gas studies in the Delta and on Fluxnet.

Publications

Greenness indices from digital cameras predict the timing and seasonal dynamics of canopy-scale photosynthesis Michael Toomey, Mark A. Friedl, Steve Frolking, Koen Hufkens, Stephen Klosterman, Oliver Sonnentag, Dennis D. Baldocchi, Carl J. Bernacchi, Sebastien C. Biraud, Gil Bohrer, Edward Brzostek, Sean P. Burns, Carole Coursolle, David Y. Hollinger, Hank A. Margolis, Harry McCaughey, Russell K. Monson, J. William Munger, Stephen Pallardy, Richard P. Phillips, Margaret S. Torn, Sonia Wharton, Marcelo Zeri, and Andrew D. Richardson. Ecological Applications 2015 25:1, 99-115 

 

Meetings

ddb participated in the scientific review of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany and is now spending the next month on sabbatical at Wageningen University in the Netherlands in the Meteorology and Air Pollution Group with Jordi Vila.

Staff News

Housen Chu is joining the Biomet Lab as a postdoc working on the Fluxnet project. He just got his PhD from the University of Toledo.

Ana Andreu Mendez is joining the Biomet Lab as a visiting scientist from Cordoba, Spain. She just got her PhD from the University of Cordoba (Spain).