Ancillary vegetation measurements at ICOS ecosystem stations

Bert Gielen (1) , Manuel Acosta (2) , Nuria Altimir (3, 4) , Nina Buchmann (5) , Alessandro Cescatti (6) , Eric Ceschia (7) , Stefan Fleck (8) , Lukas Hörtnagl (5) , Katja Klumpp (9) , Pasi Kolari (4) , Annalea Lohila (10) , Denis Loustau (11) , Sara Marañon-Jimenez (12, 13) , Tanguy Manise (14) , Giorgio Matteucci (15) , Lutz Merbold (16) , Christine Metzger (17) , Christine Moureaux (14) , Leonardo Montagnani (18, 19) , Mats B. Nilsson (20) , Bruce Osborne (21) , Dario Papale (22) , Marian Pavelka (2) , Matthew Saunders (23) , Guillaume Simioni (24) , Kamel Soudani (25) , Oliver Sonnentag (26) , Tiphaine Tallec (7) , Eeva-Stiina Tuittila (27) , Matthias Peichl (20) , Radek Pokorny (2) , Caroline Vincke (28) , Georg Wohlfahrt (29)

1 Department of Biology
2 CzechGlobe - Global Change Research Centre
3 CTFC - Centre de Ciència i Tecnologia Forestal de Catalunya
4 Department of Physics
5 ETH Zürich - Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology [Zürich]
6 Institute for the Environment and Sustainability
7 CESBIO - Centre d'études spatiales de la biosphère
8 Thuenen Institute of Forest Ecosystems
9 UREP - Unité Mixte de Recherche sur l'Ecosystème Prairial - UMR
10 FMI - Finnish Meteorological Institute
11 UMR ISPA - Interactions Sol Plante Atmosphère
12 Department of Applied Physics
13 CREAF - Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications
14 Université de Liège
15 CNR - National Research Council of Italy | Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
16 Mazingira Centre
17 KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
18 Free University of Bolzano
19 Forest Services
20 Department of Forest Ecology and Management
21 UCD - University College Dublin
22 Department for Innovation in Biological, Agro-Food and Forest Systems
23 Department of Botany - School of Natural Sciences
24 URFM - Ecologie des Forêts Méditerranéennes
25 Université Paris Saclay (COmUE)
26 Department of Geography
27 School of Forest Sciences
28 ELI - Earth and Life Institute [Louvain-La-Neuve]
29 Institute of Ecology

The Integrated Carbon Observation System is a Pan-European distributed research infrastructure that has as its main goal to monitor the greenhouse gas balance of Europe. The ecosystem component of Integrated Carbon Observation System consists of a multitude of stations where the net greenhouse gas exchange is monitored continuously by eddy covariance measurements while, in addition many other measurements are carried out that are a key to an understanding of the greenhouse gas balance. Amongst them are the continuous meteorological measurements and a set of non-continuous measurements related to vegetation. The latter include Green Area Index, aboveground biomass and litter biomass. The standardized methodology that is used at the Integrated Carbon Observation System ecosystem stations to monitor these vegetation related variables differs between the ecosystem types that are represented within the network, whereby in this paper we focus on forests, grasslands, croplands and mires. For each of the variables and ecosystems a spatial and temporal sampling design was developed so that the variables can be monitored in a consistent way within the ICOS network. The standardisation of the methodology to collect Green Area Index, above ground biomass and litter biomass and the methods to evaluate the quality of the collected data ensures that all stations within the ICOS ecosystem network produce data sets with small and similar errors, which allows for inter-comparison comparisons across the Integrated Carbon Observation System ecosystem network.

Mots clés: protocol; Green Area Index; aboveground biomass; litter biomass

Mots clés: ICOS

Domaines: Sciences du Vivant [q-bio]; Sciences de l'environnement

Bert Gielen, Manuel Acosta, Nuria Altimir, Nina Buchmann, Alessandro Cescatti, et al.. Ancillary vegetation measurements at ICOS ecosystem stations. International Agrophysics, 2018, 32 (4), pp.645-664. ⟨10.1515/intag-2017-0048⟩. ⟨hal-02621533⟩