Resolving heterogeneous fluxes from tundra halves the growing season carbon budget

Abstract

Abstract. Landscapes are often assumed to be homogeneous when interpreting eddy covariance fluxes, which can lead to biases when gap-filling and scaling-up observations to determine regional carbon budgets. Tundra ecosystems are heterogeneous at multiple scales, with variation in plant functional types, soil moisture, thaw depth, and microtopography, for example, influencing net ecosystem exchange (NEE) of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) fluxes. With warming temperatures, Arctic ecosystems could change from a net sink to a net source of carbon to the atmosphere in some locations, but the carbon balance remains highly uncertain. In this study we report results from growing season NEE and CH4 fluxes from an eddy covariance tower in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in Alaska. We used footprint models and Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to un-mix tower observations into constituent landcover fluxes based on high resolution landcover maps of the tower region. We compared three types of footprint models and used two landcover maps with varying complexity to determine the effects of these choices on derived ecosystem fluxes. We used artificially created gaps of withheld observations to compare gap-filling performance using our derived landcover-specific fluxes and traditional gap-filling methods that assume homogeneous landscapes. We also compared resulting regional carbon budgets when scaling-up observations using heterogeneous and homogeneous approaches. Traditional gap-filling methods performed worse at predicting artificially withheld gaps in NEE than those that accounted for heterogeneous landscapes, while there were only slight differences between footprint models and landcover maps. We identified and quantified hot spots of carbon fluxes in the landscape (e.g., late growing season emissions from wetlands and small ponds). We resolved distinct seasonality in tundra growing season NEE fluxes. Scaling while assuming a homogeneous landscape overestimated the growing season CO2 sink by a factor of two and underestimated CH4 emissions by a factor of two when compared to scaling with any method that accounts for landscape heterogeneity. We show how Bayesian MCMC, analytical footprint models, and high resolution landcover maps can be leveraged to derive detailed landcover carbon fluxes from eddy covariance timeseries. These results demonstrate the importance of landscape heterogeneity when scaling carbon emissions across the Arctic.

The Arctic Plant Aboveground Biomass Synthesis Dataset

“…Also consistent with prior research 23 , we observed that median bryophyte and shrub aboveground biomass were consistently higher than median lichen, herb, or tree aboveground biomass, with bryophytes comprising the largest proportion of total aboveground biomass in the High Arctic and shrubs the largest proportion in the Low Arctic. However, it is important to note there is high spatial variability in the amount and composition of plant aboveground biomass among field sites in each bioclimatic zone, reflecting pronounced heterogeneity within and among vegetation communities 61 , 62 .…”