The Kennedy Space Center Scrub Oak site is located within the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on the east coast of central Florida. Situated in a 10 ha scrub oak ecosystem, the surrounding stand was completely burned by a prescribed fire in 1996. The purpose of the burn was to control understory fuel load, which has been a common practice since 1969. Within a few weeks of the 1996 burn, the stand began to naturally regenerate from roots and rhizomes. Most scrub oak stands in the region undergo a 7 to 10 year disturbance cycle, mostly related to fire or hurricane activity. A severe drought gripped most of Florida beginning in 1998 until the later half of 2001 resulting in four years of relatively low amount of annual rainfall. Exceptionally high annual rainfall amount in 2004 was the result of a pair of hurricanes that hit the area in August and September of 2004. Prevaling wind directions for the site are as follows: W to NW in the winter, afternoon E sea breeze in the summer.

Research Topics and objectives for the Kennedy Space Center Scrub Oak site include the following: 1) Investigate the effect of elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration on aboveground biomass of a naturally re- regenerated woody ecosystem; 2) Quantify scrub oak net ecosystem exchange over a range of temporal scales from half-hour to annual; 3) Identify the magnitude and temporal scales that leaf area, air temperature, soil moisture, vapor pressure, and solar radiation influence scrub oak C fluxes; 4) Quantify and compare latent heat and sensible heat fluxes of these two adjacent, hydrologically contrasting Florida ecosystems; 5) Determine and compare the biological and environmental factors affecting the partition of the available energy into evapotranspiration and sensible heat flux between the two ecosystems (Dijkstra et al., 2002, Powell et al., 2006, Bracho et al., 2008).