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Lars Eklundh

Professor

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Upscaling Northern Peatland CO2 Fluxes Using Satellite Remote Sensing Data

Author

  • Sofia Junttila
  • Julia Kelly
  • Natascha Kljun
  • Mika Aurela
  • Leif Klemedtsson
  • Annalea Lohila
  • Mats Nilsson
  • Janne Rinne
  • Eeva-stiina Tuittila
  • Patrik Vestin
  • Per Weslien
  • Lars Eklundh
Show all

Summary, in English

Peatlands play an important role in the global carbon cycle as they contain a large soil carbon stock. However, current climate change could potentially shift peatlands from being carbon sinks to carbon sources. Remote sensing methods provide an opportunity to monitor carbon dioxide (CO2) exchange in peatland ecosystems at large scales under these changing conditions. In this study, we developed empirical models of the CO2 balance (net ecosystem exchange, NEE), gross primary production (GPP), and ecosystem respiration (ER) that could be used for upscaling CO2 fluxes with remotely sensed data. Two to three years of eddy covariance (EC) data from five peatlands in Sweden and Finland were compared to modelled NEE, GPP and ER based on vegetation indices from 10 m resolution Sentinel-2 MSI and land surface temperature from 1 km resolution MODIS data. To ensure a precise match between the EC data and the Sentinel-2 observations, a footprint model was applied to derive footprint-weighted daily means of the vegetation indices. Average model parameters for all sites were acquired with a leave-one-out-cross-validation procedure. Both the GPP and the ER models gave high agreement with the EC-derived fluxes (R2 = 0.70 and 0.56, NRMSE = 14% and 15%, respectively). The performance of the NEE model was weaker (average R2 = 0.36 and NRMSE = 13%). Our findings demonstrate that using optical and thermal satellite sensor data is a feasible method for upscaling the GPP and ER of northern boreal peatlands, although further studies are needed to investigate the sources of the unexplained spatial and temporal variation of the CO2 fluxes

Department/s

  • Dept of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science
  • BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate
  • Centre for Environmental and Climate Science (CEC)
  • MERGE: ModElling the Regional and Global Earth system
  • ICOS Sweden

Publishing year

2021-02-23

Language

English

Publication/Series

Remote Sensing

Volume

13

Issue

4

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

MDPI AG

Topic

  • Physical Geography

Keywords

  • Ecosystem respiration (ER)
  • Footprint analysis
  • Gross primary production (GPP)
  • Net ecosystem exchange (NEE)
  • Peatland
  • Sentinel-2
  • Upscaling

Status

Published

Project

  • CarboScale : Scaling carbon flux from towers to the northern landscape
  • Upscaling carbon fluxes to a landscape

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 2072-4292