FLUXNET Field Trip 2017. Demonstrating sampling method.

FLUXNET field trip 2017. Explaining sampling methods to characterize an eddy covariance site.

The FLUXNET global research community is getting support from the United States’ National Science Foundation (NSF). Trevor Keenan, assistant professor at UC Berkeley, and affiliated to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a faculty scientist, will oversee the new FLUXNET Coordination Project (FLUXNET Co-op).

FLUXNET is a global network of regional networks, with a collective of scientists managing sites all over the world that measure the exchange of carbon dioxide, water, energy, methane and other greenhouse gas fluxes between land and atmosphere. These measurements aid understanding of ecosystem function, help calibrate observations from space, and improve accuracy of climate models.

The $2 million award will create multiple research and training opportunities, expand opportunities for the next generation of FLUXNET early career scientists, support diversity among scientists, and develop the FLUXNET dataset to include more biomes and climate regions. The project will also support further development of data-focused processing protocols.

Climbers going up the US-UMB tower, which is in the middle of a mixed conifer-hardwood forest in northern Michigan. Cr. M. Saarni

Climbers going up the US-UMB tower, which is in the middle of a mixed conifer-hardwood forest in northern Michigan. Cr. M. Saarni

To support international collaborations to meet strategic global scientific challenges, the project will fund activities to enhance networking and educational and exchange opportunities such as annual in-person workshops at both national and international venues, webinar series, special focus workshops, synthesis publications, and researcher visiting exchanges.

“This is an exciting opportunity to advance ecosystem science by supporting the global research community,” Keenan said.

Co-Principal Investigators on the project are David Moore, University of Arizona, and Kimberly Novick, Indiana University, who run the FluxCourse, a summer school experience for early career scientists focusing on land-atmosphere fluxes, which takes place each summer at the University of Colorado Mountain Research Station.

Other UC Berkeley faculty involved in the project include Dennis Baldocchi, who directed a previous FLUXNET project, and Margaret Torn, adjunct professor and senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, who is principal investigator of the AmeriFlux Management Project.

The funding comes through NSF’s Accelerating Research through International Network-to-Network Collaborations (AccelNet) program, which supports strategic linkages among U.S. research networks and complementary networks abroad.