In Switzerland, the traditional three-stage grassland farming system consists of grazed or cut grasslands along a gradient from lowland to alpine elevations. We measured carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) fluxes at three grassland sites (400, 1000, 2000 m elevation) and estimated carbon sequestration for two years (2006 and 2007).Grasslands at higher elevations (>1000 m), managed at lower intensities, exhibited a larger net CO 2 uptake compared to intensively managed grasslands at lower elevations (400 m). Nevertheless, net CO 2 uptake rates during optimal growth were very similar for all three sites. Taking into account harvest outputs as well as manure inputs, we calculated the carbon stocks and their changes for grasslands at 400 m and 1000 m during two years. Similar to the cumulative net ecosystem CO 2 fluxes, the seasonal course of carbon stock changes was strongly driven by management inten- ).

Since the European summer heat wave of 2003, considerable attention has been paid to the impacts of exceptional weather events on terrestrial ecosystems. While our understanding of the effects of summer drought on ecosystem carbon and water vapour fluxes has recently advanced, the effects of spring drought remain unclear. In Switzerland, spring 2011 (March-May) was the warmest and among the driest since the beginning of meteorological measurements. This study synthesizes Swiss FluxNet data from three grassland and two forest ecosystems to investigate the effects of this spring drought. Across all sites, spring phenological development was 11 days earlier in 2011 compared to the mean of 2000-2011. Soil moisture related reductions of gross primary productivity (GPP) were found at the lowland grassland sites, where productivity did not recover following grass cuts. In contrast, spring GPP was enhanced at the montane grassland and both forests (mixed deciduous and evergreen). Evapotranspiration (ET) was reduced in forests, which also substantially increased their water-use efficiency (WUE) during spring drought, but not in grasslands. These contrasting responses to spring drought of grasslands compared to forests reflect different adaptive strategies between vegetation types, highly relevant to biosphere-atmosphere feedbacks in the climate system.

Abstract. We present the first high-resolution (500 m × 500 m) gridded methane (CH 4 ) emission inventory for Switzerland, which integrates 90 % of the national emission totals reported to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and recent CH 4 flux studies conducted by research groups across Switzerland. In addition to anthropogenic emissions, we also include natural and semi-natural CH 4 fluxes, i.e., emissions from lakes and reservoirs, wetlands, wild animals as well as uptake by forest soils. National CH 4 emissions were disaggregated using detailed geostatistical information on source locations and their spatial extent and process-or area-specific emission factors. In Switzerland, the highest CH 4 emissions in 2011 originated from the agricultural sector (150 Gg CH 4 yr −1 ), mainly produced by ruminants and manure management, followed by emissions from waste management (15 Gg CH 4 yr −1 ) mainly from landfills and the energy sector (12 Gg CH 4 yr −1 ), which was dominated by emissions from natural gas distribution. Compared with the anthropogenic sources, emissions from natural and semi-natural sources were relatively small (6 Gg CH 4 yr −1 ), making up only 3 % of the total emissions in Switzerland. CH 4 fluxes from agricultural soils were estimated to be not significantly different from zero (between −1.5 and 0 Gg CH 4 yr −1 ), while forest soils are a CH 4 sink (approx. −2.8 Gg CH 4 yr −1 ), partially offsetting other natural emissions. Estimates of uncertainties are provided for the different sources, including an estimate of spatial disaggregation errors deduced from a comparison with a global (EDGAR v4.2) and an European (TNO/MACC) CH 4 inventory. This new spatially explicit emission inventory for Switzerland will provide valuable input for regional-scale atmospheric modeling and inverse source estimation.

[1] Evapotranspiration is an important term of energy and water budgets in urban areas and is responsible for multiple ecosystem services provided by urban vegetation. The spatial heterogeneity of urban surface types with different seasonal water use patterns (e.g., trees and turfgrass lawns) complicates efforts to predict and manage urban evapotranspiration rates, necessitating a surface type, or component-based, approach. In a suburban neighborhood of Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States, we simultaneously measured ecosystem evapotranspiration and its main component fluxes using eddy covariance and heat dissipation sap flux techniques to assess the relative contribution of plant functional types (evergreen needleleaf tree, deciduous broadleaf tree, cool season turfgrass) to seasonal and spatial variations in evapotranspiration. Component-based evapotranspiration estimates agreed well with measured water vapor fluxes, although the imbalance between methods varied seasonally from a 20% overestimate in spring to an 11% underestimate in summer. Turfgrasses represented the largest contribution to annual evapotranspiration in recreational and residential land use types (87% and 64%, respectively), followed by trees (10% and 31%, respectively), with the relative contribution of plant functional types dependent on their fractional cover and daily water use. Recreational areas had higher annual evapotranspiration than residential areas (467 versus 324 mm yr −1 , respectively) and altered seasonal patterns of evapotranspiration due to greater turfgrass cover (74% versus 34%, respectively). Our results suggest that plant functional types capture much of the variability required to predict the seasonal patterns of evapotranspiration among cities, as well as differences in evapotranspiration that could result from changes in climate, land use, or vegetation composition.