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Baseline measurements of ecosystem productivity
are being made within areas of tropical moist forest, the Cerrado
(savanna) ecosystem, and tropical wetlands. Implications for
managing carbon stocks and emissions and the impacts on them of
degraded air quality and land use will be examined.
A pilot system for monitoring ecosystem productivity
is employing tower-based micrometeorological instrumentation and
techniques to examine net fluxes of carbon dioxide, water, and
energy from the ecosystem. Future efforts will supplement these
with more extensive airborne measurements of the fluxes and seasonal
measurements of selected air pollutants. Airborne observations
from U.S. and Brazilian aircraft will also be used to examine
regional changes in productivity due to forest harvesting and
ecological impacts of air pollution from burning.
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A
10-meter tower (above) is being used by Dr. Antonio Miranda and
his associates at the University of Brasília to estimate carbon,
water, and energy flux to the atmosphere from the Cerrado ecosystem
at the Aguas Emendadas Ecological Reserve (below). Flux estimates
are made from high-frequency measurements of carbon dioxide concentration,
water vapor, temperature, and the vertical velocity of the air.
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