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At least 145 records · Page 8
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2023

Turbulence regimes in the nocturnal roughness sublayer: Interaction with deep convection and tree mortality in the Amazon

We investigated the influence of seasonality and proximity to the forest canopy on nocturnal turbulence regimes in the roughness sublayer of a Central Amazon forest. Since convective systems of different scales are common in this region, we also analyzed the effect of extreme wind gusts (propagated from convective downdrafts) on the organization of the turbulence regimes, and their potential to cause the mortality of canopy trees. Our data include high-frequency winds, temperature and ozone concentration at different heights during the dry and wet seasons of 2014. In addition, we used critical wind-speed data derived from a tree-winching experiment and a modeling study conducted in the same study site. Two different turbulence regimes were identified at three heights above the canopy: a weakly stable (WS) and a very stable regime (VS). The threshold wind speeds that mark the transition between turbulence regimes were larger during the dry season and increased as a function of the height above the canopy. The turbulent fluxes of sensible heat and momentum during the WS accounted for 88% of the entire nighttime flux. Downdrafts occurred only in the WS and favored a fully coupled state of wind flow along the canopy profile. The destructive potential of winds was four times higher than on nights without downdrafts.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

An Open-Access Repository of Synchrophasor Data Quality Examples: Curation and Example Applications

Synchrophasor measurements are critical in providing wide-area situational awareness to power system operators. However, data artifacts may be introduced due to various issues such as loss of communication, loss of GPS signal, internal clock error, and vendor-specific implementation of phasor estimation algorithms. Tools designed to provide actionable insights from synchrophasor data, hence, must be designed to be robust to these data quality issues. In this work, two years of synchrophasor data sourced from multiple electric utilities in the United States were analyzed to identify examples of data quality problems. These examples were then labeled and published in the Grid Event Signature Library, a publicly available repository of power system measurements hosted by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This paper describes the data curation process, and illustrates two application use cases where the dataset can be valuable to the research community. In the first use case, a random forest classifier is trained to distinguish power system disturbance signatures from data anomalies introduced in synchrophasor measurements due to clock errors. The second use case studies the impact of data quality issues on an example synchrophasor application (specifically, event start time determination). The choice of data quality problems investigated is informed by the examples in the repository curated in this work.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2023

Climate Change Will Increase Biomass Proportion of Global Forest Carbon Stocks Under an SSP5–8.5 Climate Trajectory

Abstract A large amount of carbon is stored in global forests. However, the fraction of carbon stored as plant biomass versus soil organic carbon (SOC) varies among forest types, and potential changes over the 21st century are uncertain. Here, we used extensive data derived from inventories and remote sensing and Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) models to examine the current and 21st century dynamics in the proportion of biomass and SOC across global forests. We found that precipitation, elevation, soil, and wildfire were the primary controls of these differences in carbon pools. Under the SSP5–8.5 climate scenario, CMIP6 models project that the ratio of biomass to ecosystem carbon in global forests will increase across the 21st century, with the largest increases in boreal forests (95 ± 37%) compared to moist tropical forests (16 ± 15%). Changes in forest carbon pools resulting in greater biomass fraction will affect disturbance, and ecosystem carbon and energy balances, all of which interact with the climate system.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Forest regeneration within Earth system models: current process representations and ways forward

Earth system models must predict forest responses to global change in order to simulate future global climate, hydrology, and ecosystem dynamics. These models are increasingly adopting vegetation demographic approaches that explicitly represent tree growth, mortality, and recruitment, enabling advances in the projection of forest vulnerability and resilience, as well as evaluation with field data. To date, simulation of regeneration processes has received far less attention than simulation of processes that affect growth and mortality, in spite of their critical role maintaining forest structure, facilitating turnover in forest composition over space and time, enabling recovery from disturbance, and regulating climate-driven range shifts. Here, our critical review of regeneration process representations within current Earth system vegetation demographic models reveals the need to improve parameter values and algorithms for reproductive allocation, dispersal, seed survival and germination, environmental filtering in the seedling layer, and tree regeneration strategies adapted to wind, fire, and anthropogenic disturbance regimes. These improvements require synthesis of existing data, specific field data-collection protocols, and novel model algorithms compatible with global-scale simulations. Vegetation demographic models offer the opportunity to more fully integrate ecological understanding into Earth system prediction; regeneration processes need to be a critical part of the effort.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2020

Tropical understory herbaceous community responds more strongly to hurricane disturbance than to experimental warming

The effects of climate change on tropical forests may have global consequences due to the forests’ high biodiversity and major role in the global carbon cycle. In this study, we document the effects of experimental warming on the abundance and composition of a tropical forest floor herbaceous plant community in the Luquillo Experimental Forest, Puerto Rico. This study was conducted within Tropical Responses to Altered Climate Experiment (TRACE) plots, which use infrared heaters under free-air, open-field conditions, to warm understory vegetation and soils + 4°C above nearby control plots. Hurricanes Irma and María damaged the heating infrastructure in the second year of warming, therefore, the study included one pretreatment year, one year of warming, and one year of hurricane response with no warming. We measured percent leaf cover of individual herbaceous species, fern population dynamics, and species richness and diversity within three warmed and three control plots. Results showed that one year of experimental warming did not significantly affect the cover of individual herbaceous species, fern population dynamics, species richness, or species diversity. In contrast, herbaceous cover increased from 20% to 70%, bare ground decreased from 70% to 6%, and species composition shifted pre to posthurricane. The negligible effects of warming may have been due to the short duration of the warming treatment or an understory that is somewhat resistant to higher temperatures. Our results suggest that climate extremes that are predicted to increase with climate change, such as hurricanes and droughts, may cause more abrupt changes in tropical forest understories than longer-term sustained warming.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Resilience in soil bacterial communities of the boreal forest from one to five years after wildfire across a severity gradient

Wildfires can represent a major disturbance to ecosystems, including soil microbial communities belowground. Furthermore, fire regimes are changing in many parts of the world, altering and often increasing fire severity, frequency, and size. The boreal forest and taiga plains ecoregions of northern Canada are characterized by naturally-occurring stand-replacing wildfires on a 40–350 year basis. We previously studied the effects of wildfire on soil microbial communities one year post-fire across 40 sites, spanning a range of burn severity. Here, we return to the same sites five years post-fire to test a series of hypotheses about the effects of fire on bacterial community composition. We ask questions on two themes: which factors control bacterial community composition during post-fire recovery, and how does the importance of different fire-responsive traits change during post-fire recovery? We find the following: Five years post-fire, vegetation community, moisture regime, pH, total carbon, texture, and burned/unburned all remained significant predictors of bacterial community composition with similar predictive value (R 2 ). Bacterial communities became more similar to unburned sites five years post-fire, across the range of severity, suggesting resilience, while general structure of co-occurrence networks remained similar one and five years post-fire. Fast growth potential, as estimated using predicted 16S rRNA copy numbers, was no longer significantly correlated with burn severity five years post-fire, indicating the importance of this trait for structuring bacterial community composition may be limited to relatively short timescales. Many taxa that were enriched in burned sites one year post-fire remained enriched five years post-fire, although the degree to which they were enriched generally decreased. Specific taxa of interest from the genera Massilia, Blastococcus, and Arthrobacter all remained significantly enriched, suggesting that they may have traits that allow them to continue to flourish in the post-fire environment, such as tolerance to increased pH or ability to degrade pyrogenic organic matter. This hypothesis-based work expands our understanding of the post-fire recovery of soil bacterial communities and raises new hypotheses to test in future studies.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2021

Joint effects of climate, tree size, and year on annual tree growth derived from tree–ring records of ten globally distributed forests

Tree rings provide an invaluable long-term record for understanding how climate and other drivers shape tree growth and forest productivity. However, conventional tree-ring analysis methods were not designed to simultaneously test effects of climate, tree size, and other drivers on individual growth. This has limited the potential to test ecologically relevant hypotheses on tree growth sensitivity to environmental drivers and their interactions with tree size. Here, we develop and apply a new method to simultaneously model nonlinear effects of primary climate drivers, reconstructed tree diameter at breast height (DBH), and calendar year in generalized least squares models that account for the temporal autocorrelation inherent to each individual tree's growth. We analyze data from 3811 trees representing 40 species at 10 globally distributed sites, showing that precipitation, temperature, DBH, and calendar year have additively, and often interactively, influenced annual growth over the past 120 years. Growth responses were predominantly positive to precipitation (usually over ≥3-month seasonal windows) and negative to temperature (usually maximum temperature, over ≤3-month seasonal windows), with concave-down responses in 63% of relationships. Climate sensitivity commonly varied with DBH (45% of cases tested), with larger trees usually more sensitive. Trends in ring width at small DBH were linked to the light environment under which trees established, but basal area or biomass increments consistently reached maxima at intermediate DBH. Accounting for climate and DBH, growth rate declined over time for 92% of species in secondary or disturbed stands, whereas growth trends were mixed in older forests. These trends were largely attributable to stand dynamics as cohorts and stands age, which remain challenging to disentangle from global change drivers. By providing a parsimonious approach for characterizing multiple interacting drivers of tree growth, our method reveals a more complete picture of the factors influencing growth than has previously been possible.

generalized least squares (GLS)↗
DOE OSTI2022

Stand and environmental conditions drive functional shifts associated with mesophication in eastern US forests

There is a growing body of evidence that mesic tree species are increasing in importance across much of the eastern US. This increase is often observed in tandem with a decrease in the abundance and importance of species considered to be better adapted to disturbance and drier conditions (e.g., Quercus species). Concern over this transition is related to several factors, including the potential that this transition is self-reinforcing (termed “mesophication”), will result in decreased resiliency of forests to a variety of disturbances, and may negatively impact ecosystem functioning, timber value, and wildlife habitat. Evidence for shifts in composition provide broad-scale support for mesophication, but we lack information on the fine-scale factors that drive the associated functional changes. Understanding this variability is particularly important as managers work to develop site-and condition-specific management practices to target stands or portions of the landscape where this transition is occurring or is likely to occur in the future. To address this knowledge gap and identify forests that are most susceptible to mesophication (which we evaluate as a functional shift to less drought or fire tolerant, or more shade tolerant, forests), we used data from the USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis program to determine what fine-scale factors impact the rate (change through time) and degree (difference between the overstory and midstory) of change in eastern US forests. We found that mesophication varies along stand and environmental gradients, but this relationship depended on the functional trait examined. For example, shade and drought tolerance suggest mesophication is greatest at sites with more acidic soils, while fire tolerance suggests mesophication increases with soil pH. Mesophication was also generally more pronounced in older stands, stands with more variable diameters, and in wetter sites, but plots categorized as “hydric” were often highly variable. Our results provide evidence that stand-scale conditions impact current and potential future changes in trait conditions and composition across eastern US forests. We provide a starting point for managers looking to prioritize portions of the landscape most at risk and developing treatments to address the compositional and functional changes associated with mesophication.

Woodbridge, Margaret↗
DOE OSTI2024

Forest Carbon Storage in the Western United States: Distribution, Drivers, and Trends

Abstract Forests are a large carbon sink and could serve as natural climate solutions that help moderate future warming. Thus, establishing forest carbon baselines is essential for tracking climate‐mitigation targets. Western US forests are natural climate solution hotspots but are profoundly threatened by drought and altered disturbance regimes. How these factors shape spatial patterns of carbon storage and carbon change over time is poorly resolved. Here, we estimate live and dead forest carbon density in 19 forested western US ecoregions with national inventory data (2005–2019) to determine: (a) current carbon distributions, (b) underpinning drivers, and (c) recent trends. Potential drivers of current carbon included harvest, wildfire, insect and disease, topography, and climate. Using random forests, we evaluated driver importance and relationships with current live and dead carbon within ecoregions. We assessed trends using linear models. Pacific Northwest (PNW) and Southwest (SW) ecoregions were most and least carbon dense, respectively. Climate was an important carbon driver in the SW and Lower Rockies. Fire reduced live and increased dead carbon, and was most important in the Upper Rockies and California. No ecoregion was unaffected by fire. Harvest and private ownership reduced carbon, particularly in the PNW. Since 2005, live carbon declined across much of the western US, likely from drought and fire. Carbon has increased in PNW ecoregions, likely recovering from past harvest, but recent record fire years may alter trajectories. Our results provide insight into western US forest carbon function and future vulnerabilities, which is vital for effective climate change mitigation strategies.

Environmental Sciences & Ecology↗
DOE OSTI2023

Exploring for Superhot Geothermal Targets in Magmatic Settings: 2022 Field Campaign at Newberry Volcano

This paper presents preliminary results from a subset of work carried out as part of a multinational research project entitled DErisking Exploration for multiple geothermal Plays in magmatic ENvironments (DEEPEN), supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Geothermica, a joint effort by EU member states and associated countries. The DEEPEN project will develop a customized approach to exploration for supercritical and superhot geothermal plays in magmatic systems, which will be applied to two demonstration sites. This paper summarizes field activities carried out at the U.S. demonstration site, Newberry Volcano in central Oregon. The objective of this work effort is to refine the subsurface model of Newberry Volcano, with special focus on deeper zones including the magmatic plumbing system and other key geologic elements. New data collection included gravity and wideband magnetotelluric (MT) surveys, as well as reinstallation of a seismic network. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Enthalpion Energy LLC (Enthalpion) worked with the Deschutes National Forest Fort Rock District to use a low ground disturbance method of MT deployment to collect MT data inside the caldera and other restricted areas inside the National Volcanic Monument. This opened these areas to geophysical exploration for the first time in decades. Sites along and adjacent to the south rim of the volcano constituted the primary survey objectives. A team from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and AltaRock also began the process of reinstalling the seismic network from the AltaRock enhanced geothermal system (EGS) demonstration in anticipation of further development activities at the site. The data ingestion, reduction, and analysis phase of the project is ongoing. We are currently processing the MT and gravity data and are developing a new, highly GPU-accelerated, 3D joint MT and gravity inversion to better localize the south rim/south flank conductive target and better understand its relationship to deep heat, fluid sources, and surface extrusive features. Joint inversions, which have not yet been undertaken at Newberry, will allow us to obtain constraints on the geologic model that cannot be determined from each method in isolation, improving our ability to image key geologic features at depth.

geophysics↗
DOE OSTI2022

Understory plant communities show resistance to drought, hurricanes, and experimental warming in a wet tropical forest

Global climate change has led to rising temperatures and to more frequent and intense climatic events, such as storms and droughts. Changes in climate and disturbance regimes can have non-additive effects on plant communities and result in complicated legacies we have yet to understand. This is especially true for tropical forests, which play a significant role in regulating global climate. We used understory vegetation data from the Tropical Responses to Altered Climate Experiment (TRACE) in Puerto Rico to evaluate how plant communities responded to climate warming and disturbance. The TRACE understory vegetation was exposed to a severe drought (2015), 2 years of experimental warming (4°C above ambient in half of the plots, 2016–2017 and 2018–2019), and two major hurricanes (Irma and María, September 2017). Woody seedlings and saplings were censused yearly from 2015 to 2019, with an additional census in 2015 after the drought ended. We evaluated disturbance-driven changes in species richness, diversity, and composition across ontogeny. We then used Bayesian predictive trait modeling to assess how species responded to disturbance and how this might influence the functional structure of the plant community. Our results show decreased seedling richness after hurricane disturbance, as well as increased sapling richness and diversity after warming. We found a shift in species composition through time for both seedlings and saplings, yet the individual effects of each disturbance were not significant. At both ontogenetic stages, we observed about twice as many species responding to experimental warming as those responding to drought and hurricanes. Predicted changes in functional structure point to disturbance-driven functional shifts toward a mixture of fast-growing and drought-tolerant species. Our findings demonstrate that the tropical forest understory community is more resistant to climatic stressors than expected, especially at the sapling stage. However, early signs of changes in species composition suggest that, in a warming climate with frequent droughts and hurricanes, plant communities might shift over time toward fast-growing or drought-tolerant species.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Fire, insect and disease‐caused tree mortalities increased in forests of greater structural diversity during drought

Abstract Structural diversity is an emerging dimension of biodiversity that accounts for size variations in organs among individuals in a community. Previous studies show significant effects of structural diversity on forest growth, but its effects on forest mortality are not known, particularly at a large scale. To address this knowledge gap, we quantified structural diversity using stem structural diversity (SSD) based on both tree diameter and height. We obtained U.S. Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data from over 2400 plots across southcentral U.S. forests that have suffered a recent drought. Using data from multiple sampling times, we calculated SSD and compared the relative importance of SSD, species diversity, functional diversity and other stand attributes in determining tree mortalities caused by fire, insects and diseases. We also used FIRETEC, a physics‐based fire model, to test the effect of SSD on canopy consumption by fire. Our results showed that (1) SSD was positively associated with tree mortalities caused by all three disturbances; (2) species richness was negatively associated with insect‐ and disease‐caused mortalities; (3) functional diversity was negatively associated with fire‐ and disease‐caused mortalities and (4) more phylogenetically related species had more similar mortality rates by insect and disease but not fire. Moreover, the FIRETEC model showed increasing canopy consumption by fire in stands with greater SSD. Together, the different tree mortalities during drought associated with SSD more consistently than the other biodiversity metrics were evaluated. Synthesis . Our results suggest that SSD could be considered in modelling forest dynamics and planning management to sustain forest health under disturbances.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2020

Tropical Cyclone Ecology: A Scale-Link Perspective

Tropical cyclones are increasing in intensity and size and, thus, are poised to increase in importance as disturbance agents. Our understanding of cyclone ecology is biased towards the North Atlantic Basin, because cyclone effects do differ across oceanic basins. Cyclones have both short and long-term effects across the levels of biological organization, but we lack a scale-perspective of cyclone ecology. Effects on individual trees, such as defoliation or branch stripping and uprooting, are mechanistically linked to effects at the community and ecosystem levels, including forest productivity and stand regeneration time. Forest dwarfing via the gradual removal of taller trees by cyclones over many generations illustrates that cyclones shape forest structure through the accumulation of short-term effects over longer timescales.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Climate Warming Alters Nutrient Storage in Seasonally Dry Forests: Insights From a 2,300 m Elevation Gradient

Understanding potential response of forest carbon (C) and nutrient storage to warming is important for climate mitigation policies. Unfortunately, those responses are difficult to predict in seasonally dry forests, in part, because ecosystem processes are highly sensitive to both changes in temperature and precipitation. We investigated how warming might alter stocks of C, nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) in vegetation and the entire regolith (soil + weathered bedrock or “saprock”) using a space-for-time substitution along a bioclimatic gradient in the Sierra Nevada, California. The pine-oak and mixed-conifer forests between 1,160–2,015 m elevation have more optimal climates (not too dry or hot) for ecosystem productivity, soil weathering, and cycling of essential elements than the oak savannah (405 m) and subalpine forest (2,700 m). We found decreases in overstory vegetation nutrient stocks with decreasing elevation because of enhanced water limitation and greater occurrence of disturbances. Stocks of C, N, and P in the entire regolith peaked at the pine-oak and mixed-conifer forests across the bioclimatic gradient, driven by thicker regolith profiles and greater nutrient input rates. These observations suggest long-term warming will decrease ecosystem nutrient storage at the warmer, transitional pine-oak zone, but will increase nutrient storage at the colder, subalpine zone. Assuming steady-state conditions, we found the mean residence time of ecosystem C decreased with projected rising air temperatures and increased following a major drought event across the bioclimatic gradient. Our study emphasizes potentially elevation-dependent changes in nutrient storage and C persistence with warming in seasonally dry forests.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2020

Montane forest productivity across a semiarid climatic gradient

Abstract High‐elevation montane forests are disproportionately important to carbon sequestration in semiarid climates where low elevations are dry and characterized by low carbon density ecosystems. However, these ecosystems are increasingly threatened by climate change with seasonal implications for photosynthesis and forest growth. As a result, we leveraged eddy covariance data from six evergreen conifer forest sites in the semiarid western United States to extrapolate the status of carbon sequestration within a framework of projected warming and drying. At colder locations, the seasonal evolution of gross primary productivity (GPP) was characterized by a single broad maximum during the summer that corresponded to snow melt‐derived moisture and a transition from winter dormancy to spring activity. Conversely, winter dormancy was transient at warmer locations, and GPP was responsive to both winter and summer precipitation such that two distinct GPP maxima were separated by a period of foresummer drought. This resulted in a predictable sequence of primary limiting factors to GPP beginning with air temperature in winter and proceeding to moisture and leaf area during the summer. Due to counteracting winter (positive) and summer (negative) GPP responses to warming, leaf area index and moisture availability were the best predictors of annual GPP differences across sites. Overall, mean annual GPP was greatest at the warmest site due to persistent vegetation photosynthetic activity throughout the winter. These results indicate that the trajectory of this region's carbon sequestration will be sensitive to reduced or delayed summer precipitation, especially if coupled to snow drought and earlier soil moisture recession, but summer precipitation changes remain highly uncertain. Given the demonstrated potential for seasonally offsetting responses to warming, we project that decadal semiarid montane forest carbon sequestration will remain relatively stable in the absence of severe disturbance.

Knowles, John F.↗
DOE OSTI2023

Salinity–induced limits to mangrove canopy height

Aim: Mangrove canopy height is a key metric to assess tidal forests' resilience in the face of climate change. In terrestrial forests, tree height is primarily determined by water availability, plant hydraulic design, and disturbance regime. However, the role of water stress remains elusive in tidal environments, where saturated soils are prevalent, and salinity can substantially affect the soil water potential. Location: Global. Time Period: The canopy height dataset provides a global snapshot of the maximum mangrove height geographical distribution for the year 2000. Climate and environmental variables extend over the period 1970–2018. Major Taxa Studied: Mangroves. Methods: We use global observations of maximum canopy height, species richness, air temperature, and seawater salinity—a proxy of soil water salt concentration—to explore the causal link between salinity and mangrove stature. Results: Our findings suggest that salt stress limits mangrove height. High salinity favours more salt-tolerant species, narrowing the spectrum of viable traits. Highly salt-tolerant mangroves have evolved to cope with high salt concentrations in the soil, but this adaptation comes at a cost. They typically have lower rates of photosynthesis and growth, resulting in reduced productivity and smaller stature compared to more salt-sensitive mangrove species. This suggests a causal link between salinity, biodiversity, and tree height, where high salinity selects for more salt-tolerant species that tend to be less productive and shorter. Conclusions: We hypothesize that the salinity-induced limit to mangrove canopy height is the direct result of a reduction of primary productivity, an increment in the risk of xylem cavitation, and an indirect consequence of the decrease in biodiversity. As sea-level rise enhances coastal salinisation, failure to account for these effects can lead to incorrect estimates of future carbon stocks in Tropical coastal ecosystems and endanger preservation efforts.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

AmeriFlux US-MEF Manitou Experimental Forest

This is the AmeriFlux version of the carbon flux data for the site US-MEF Manitou Experimental Forest. Site Description - This site was established on an existing 30-m tower structure at the Forest Service's Manitou Experimental Forest, Colorado. Manitou Experimental Forest is located approximately 38 km northwest of Colorado Springs, within the Pike National Forest. The tower was constructed and used between 2008 and 2013 by NCAR for the BEACHON project and has line power and internet connections. The tower is located in approximately 12 km^2 of ponderosa pine forest and savannah with a land use history of thinning and prescribed burning, though these disturbances have not occurred for many years. The tower is situated in a broad, flat valley that drains to the north. Early research at the site was focused mainly on grazing, while more recently it has turned broadly to the ecology and management of ponderosa pine ecosystems. In 2002, the Hayman Fire burned approximately 56,000 ha to the west and northwest of the tower location.

Frank, John [US Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Res↗
DOE OSTI2026

AmeriFlux FLUXNET-1F US-MEF Manitou Experimental Forest

This is the AmeriFlux Management Project (AMP) created FLUXNET-1F version of the carbon flux data for the site US-MEF Manitou Experimental Forest. This is the FLUXNET version of the carbon flux data for the site US-MEF Manitou Experimental Forest produced by applying the standard ONEFlux (1F) software. Site Description - This site was established on an existing 30-m tower structure at the Forest Service's Manitou Experimental Forest, Colorado. Manitou Experimental Forest is located approximately 38 km northwest of Colorado Springs, within the Pike National Forest. The tower was constructed and used between 2008 and 2013 by NCAR for the BEACHON project and has line power and internet connections. The tower is located in approximately 12 km^2 of ponderosa pine forest and savannah with a land use history of thinning and prescribed burning, though these disturbances have not occurred for many years. The tower is situated in a broad, flat valley that drains to the north. Early research at the site was focused mainly on grazing, while more recently it has turned broadly to the ecology and management of ponderosa pine ecosystems. In 2002, the Hayman Fire burned approximately 56,000 ha to the west and northwest of the tower location.

Frank, John [US Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Res↗