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Chamberlain, Samuel D.

Publications and source records attributed to Chamberlain, Samuel D..

Intensification differentially affects the delivery of multiple ecosystem services in subtropical and temperate grasslands

Intensification, the process of intensifying land management to enhance agricultural goods, results in “intensive” pastures that are planted with productive grasses and fertilized. These intensive pastures provide essential ecosystem services, including forage production for livestock. Understanding the synergies and tradeoffs of pasture intensification on the delivery of services across climatic regions is crucial to shape policies and incentives for better management of natural resources. Here, we investigated how grassland intensification affects key components of provisioning (forage productivity and quality), supporting (plant diversity) and regulating services (CO 2 and CH 4 fluxes) by comparing these services between intensive versus extensive pastures in subtropical and temperate pastures in the USDA Long-term Agroecosystem Research (LTAR) Network sites in Florida and Oklahoma, USA over multiple years. Our results suggest that grassland intensification led to a decrease in measured supporting and regulating services, but increased forage productivity in temperate pastures and forage digestibility in subtropical pastures. Intensification decreased the net CO 2 sink of subtropical pastures while it did not affect the sink capacity of temperate pastures; and it also increased environmental CH 4 emissions from subtropical pastures and reduced CH 4 uptake in temperate pastures. Intensification enhanced the global warming potential associated with C fluxes of pastures in both ecoregions. Our study demonstrates that comparisons of agroecosystems in contrasting ecoregions can reveal important drivers of ecosystem services and general or region-specific opportunities and solutions to maintaining agricultural production and reducing environmental footprints. Further LTAR network-scale comparisons of multiple ecosystem services across croplands and grazinglands intensively vs extensively managed are warranted to inform the sustainable intensification of agriculture within US and beyond. Our results highlight that achieving both food security and environmental stewardship will involve the conservation of less intensively managed pastures while adopting sustainable strategies in intensively managed pastures.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

AmeriFlux FLUXNET-1F US-Bi1 Bouldin Island Alfalfa

This is the AmeriFlux Management Project (AMP) created FLUXNET-1F version of the carbon flux data for the site US-Bi1 Bouldin Island Alfalfa. This is the FLUXNET version of the carbon flux data for the site US-Bi1 Bouldin Island Alfalfa produced by applying the standard ONEFlux (1F) software. Site Description - An agricultural field in the San Joaquin Sacramento Delta. The field is a mix of organic peat and sediments and minerals from old river channels

Rey-Sanchez, Camilo↗

A novel approach to partitioning evapotranspiration into evaporation and transpiration in flooded ecosystems

Reliable partitioning of micrometeorologically measured evapotranspiration (ET) into evaporation (E) and transpiration (T) would greatly enhance our understanding of the water cycle and its response to climate change related shifts in local-to-regional climate conditions and rising global levels of vapor pressure deficit (VPD). While some methods on ET partitioning have been developed, their underlying assumptions make them difficult to apply more generally, especially in sites with large contributions of E. Here, we report a novel ET partitioning method using artificial neural networks (ANNs) in combination with a range of environmental input variables to predict daytime E from nighttime ET measurements. The study uses eddy covariance data from four restored wetlands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, California, USA, as well as leaf-level T data for validation. The four wetlands vary in their vegetation make-up and structure, representing a range of ET conditions. The ANNs were built with increasing complexity by adding the input variable that resulted in the next highest average value of model testing R 2 across all sites. The order of variable inclusion (and importance) was: VPD > gap-filled sensible heat flux (H_gf) > air temperature (T air ) > friction velocity (u * ) > other variables. The model using VPD, H_gf, T air , and u * showed the best performance during validation with independent data and had a mean testing R 2 value of 0.853 (averaged across all sites, range from 0.728 to 0.910). In comparison to other methods, our ANN method generated T/ET partitioning results which were more consistent with CO 2 exchange data especially for more heterogeneous sites with large E contributions. Further, our method improves the understanding of T/ET partitioning. While it may be particularly suited to flooded ecosystems, it can also improve T/ET partitioning in other systems, increasing our knowledge of the global water cycle and ecosystem functioning.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

AmeriFlux US-Bi1 Bouldin Island Alfalfa

This is the AmeriFlux version of the carbon flux data for the site US-Bi1 Bouldin Island Alfalfa. Site Description - An agricultural field in the San Joaquin Sacramento Delta. The field is a mix of organic peat and sediments and minerals from old river channels

Rey-Sanchez, Camilo↗

A Biogeochemical Compromise: The High Methane Cost of Sequestering Carbon in Restored Wetlands

Abstract Peatland drainage is an important driver of global soil carbon loss and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions. Restoration of peatlands by reflooding reverses CO 2 losses at the cost of increased methane (CH 4 ) emissions, presenting a biogeochemical compromise. While restoring peatlands is a potentially effective method for sequestering carbon, the terms of this compromise are not well constrained. Here we present 14 site years of continuous CH 4 and CO 2 ecosystem‐scale gas exchange over a network of restored freshwater wetlands in California, where long growing seasons, warm weather, and managed water tables result in some of the largest wetland ecosystem CH 4 emissions recorded. These large CH 4 emissions cause the wetlands to be strong greenhouse gas sources while sequestering carbon and building peat soil. The terms of this biogeochemical compromise, dictated by the ratio between carbon sequestration and CH 4 emission, vary considerably across small spatial scales, despite nearly identical wetland climate, hydrology, and plant community compositions.

Hemes, Kyle S.↗