Methane absorbs and re-emits longwave radiation from the Earth’s surface, trapping 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year timescale. Methane is responsible for 25% of anthropogenic warming to date even in its relatively small atmospheric concentration. Methane emissions originate from both anthropogenic sources (e.g., fossil fuel and agriculture) and natural sources (e.g., wetlands and trees). However, the causes, magnitude, and feedback systems of methane fluxes from soil and tree stems are not well understood, leading to problems understanding and modeling forests’ roles in the climate system and in predicting how they will affect and/or be affected by a warming world. Understanding the vertical profile of gas concentration, production, and consumption in forest soils can allow us to contextualize the net atmospheric gas exchange from soils and trees by discretizing gas transport and efflux into segments with their own distinct behavior. For example, below a certain depth, soil becomes functionally anoxic because biological demand for oxygen exceeds its rate of diffusion from the atmosphere. We can estimate this boundary between the soil’s anoxic layer, where methane-producing microbes (methanogens) proliferate, and the oxic layer, where methane-consuming microbes (methanotrophs) proliferate, and find drivers of temporal or spatial variations in this boundary’s depth more accurately than we can by looking at the net flux at the surface. In order to model the gas profile for the soil at Harvard Forest, I created a simple numerical optimization model to find best fit values for soil activity and diffusion coefficients of the analytical solution to the diffusion equation in order to best fit methane and carbon dioxide concentration data from wells at varying depths up to 50cm across Harvard Forest. Comparing these data to entire ecosystem changes (e.g. precipitation, temperature) could be a helpful way to parametrize the forest as a whole and validate estimates on net greenhouse gas flux.