Harvard Forest Symposium Abstract 2008

Title: Monitoring and modeling of soil heat, water, and gas transport
Primary Author: Eric Sundquist (U.S. Geological Survey)
Abstract:
The U.S. Geological Survey group in Woods Hole has found it necessary to reduce its activities at Harvard Forest due to resource limitations. We continue to monitor soil temperature and moisture profiles at the “North Pierce Farm” site that we have studied for a number of years. We plan to compile and analyze these data and apply them to models of soil heat, water, and gas transport. We hope to resume studies of soil surface CO2 fluxes, depending on availability of resources. Our interest continues to be the relationships between spatially coherent variations in soil properties and soil surface CO2 fluxes at diel to seasonal time scales. In support of this research, we have conducted extensive experiments and model calculations to assess the accuracy of soil surface CO2 efflux measurements using a chamber technique. Our experiments utilize two different methods for imposing known CO2 fluxes through columns of sand. We compare steady-state column fluxes to chamber measurements at the column sand surface. These experiments enable us to estimate measurement artifacts due to variations in column and chamber geometry, flux magnitude, and gas transport conditions (both diffusion and advection).
Research Category: Soil Carbon and Nitrogen Dynamics

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