ABSTRACT It is essential to understand the drivers and processes that regulate uptake and release... more ABSTRACT It is essential to understand the drivers and processes that regulate uptake and release of carbon and water by the terrestrial biosphere to quantify the sink and source strengths under current climatic conditions. In addition, understanding the consequences of a changing climate on the capacity of the biosphere to sequester carbon by using a certain amount of water and the impacts of disturbances on resilience and thresholds of the terrestrial biosphere is critical. Recently there has been increasing general interest in how human activities may be affecting Australia's natural carbon cycles. Quantification of carbon and water exchanges requires process understanding over long temporal and large spatial scales, but at fine levels of detail. This requires integration of long term, high frequency observations, models and information from process studies and can only be achieved through research infrastructure that can provide easy access to meta-data and data that have been collected in a systematic and standardized way. The Australian Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) provides such nationally networked infrastructure, along with multi-disciplinary capabilities and end-user-focused products to deliver better ways of measuring and estimating Australia's current and future environmental carbon stocks and flows. Multiple Facilities in TERN are studying carbon and water dynamics across a range of distance and time scales. OzFlux, the Australasian arm of the global initiative Fluxnet, is the most obvious deployment of field hardware in TERN with close to 30 flux towers and their associated micrometeorological instrumentation in place around the country, from Central Australia to the Alps, covering ecosystems ranging from rainforest to alpine grasslands to mulga. Intensive monitoring is carried out at the 10 TERN Supersites which carry a suite of environmental instrumentation and perform standardised vegetation, faunal, soil and water monitoring.TERN AusCover provides a national expert network and data delivery service for provision of Australian biophysical remote sensing time-series data, continental-scale map products, and select high-resolution datasets over TERN OzFlux and Supersites. Integration of data streams and modeling is carried out through the TERN eMAST Facility. This presentation will give an overview of the infrastructure related to research in biogeochemistry through TERN. We will show how the deployment of large-scale infrastructure, observations, the curation of data and assimilation and integration of data into modelling is enhancing our process understanding of carbon uptake and water use in a large range of ecosystems.
Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment, 2004
Quantifying mass and energy exchanges within tropical forests is essential for understanding thei... more Quantifying mass and energy exchanges within tropical forests is essential for understanding their role in the global carbon budget and how they will respond to perturbations in climate. This study reviews ecosystem process models designed to predict the growth and productivity of temperate and tropical forest ecosystems. Temperate forest models were included because of the minimal number of tropical forest models. The review provides a multiscale assessment enabling potential users to select a model suited to the scale and type of information they require in tropical forests. Process models are reviewed in relation to their input and output parameters, minimum spatial and temporal units of operation, maximum spatial extent and time period of application for each organization level of modelling. Organizational levels included leaf-tree, plot-stand, regional and ecosystem levels, with model complexity decreasing as the time-step and spatial extent of model operation increases. All ec...
ABSTRACT Hyperspectral remote sensing has promised a new era in quantitative measurement of key p... more ABSTRACT Hyperspectral remote sensing has promised a new era in quantitative measurement of key properties of terrestrial systems. The high information content, mechanistic relationships between reflectance spectra and canopy, leaf and molecular properties, and combination of computing power, algorithm maturity and highly quantitative methodology provides the basis for delivery of key information into new international research and observation frameworks seeking to provide societal benefits. This paper describes current capacity of global biophysical remote sensing and defines products that could be delivered by a new sensor. New products could be particularly useful in description of ecosystem services.
Satellite technologies available in Australia today span a very large range of applications, from... more Satellite technologies available in Australia today span a very large range of applications, from telecommunications to global positioning systems and earth observation. Multi-billion dollar investments by various nations and private industry in global positioning systems and earth-observation systems have underpinned the development of agronomic applications, such as ‘Precision Agriculture’ and satellite-based estimations of feed on offer. Despite this large supply of technologies, the uptake of such remote sensing for pasture management has been minimal due to the difficulty of use of this data by non-experts and the lack of routine accessibility to support day-to-day management decisions. This paper will provide a brief description of the technology of earth observation in Australia, followed by some concrete examples of its use in baseline mapping of the diversity and extent of grasslands for monitoring of pasture condition and estimation of feed quality, in particular.
Background Earth Observation ‘EO’ remote sensing technology development enables original insights... more Background Earth Observation ‘EO’ remote sensing technology development enables original insights into vegetation function and health at ever finer temporal, spectral and spatial resolution. Research sites equipped with monitoring infrastructure such as flux towers operate at a key bridging scale between satellite platform measurements and on-the-ground leaf-level processes. Results This paper presents the technical details of the design and operation of a proximal observation system ‘THEMS’ that generates unattended long-term high quality thermal and hyperspectral images of a forest canopy on a short (sub-daily) timescale. The primary purpose of the system is to measure canopy temperature, spectral reflectance and radiance coincident with a highly instrumented flux tower site for benchmarking purposes. Basic system capability is demonstrated through low level data product descriptions of the high-resolution multi-angular imagery and ancillary data streams. The system has been succe...
IGARSS 2001. Scanning the Present and Resolving the Future. Proceedings. IEEE 2001 International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (Cat. No.01CH37217)
IGARSS 2001. Scanning the Present and Resolving the Future. Proceedings. IEEE 2001 International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (Cat. No.01CH37217), 2001
ABSTRACT It is essential to understand the drivers and processes that regulate uptake and release... more ABSTRACT It is essential to understand the drivers and processes that regulate uptake and release of carbon and water by the terrestrial biosphere to quantify the sink and source strengths under current climatic conditions. In addition, understanding the consequences of a changing climate on the capacity of the biosphere to sequester carbon by using a certain amount of water and the impacts of disturbances on resilience and thresholds of the terrestrial biosphere is critical. Recently there has been increasing general interest in how human activities may be affecting Australia's natural carbon cycles. Quantification of carbon and water exchanges requires process understanding over long temporal and large spatial scales, but at fine levels of detail. This requires integration of long term, high frequency observations, models and information from process studies and can only be achieved through research infrastructure that can provide easy access to meta-data and data that have been collected in a systematic and standardized way. The Australian Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) provides such nationally networked infrastructure, along with multi-disciplinary capabilities and end-user-focused products to deliver better ways of measuring and estimating Australia's current and future environmental carbon stocks and flows. Multiple Facilities in TERN are studying carbon and water dynamics across a range of distance and time scales. OzFlux, the Australasian arm of the global initiative Fluxnet, is the most obvious deployment of field hardware in TERN with close to 30 flux towers and their associated micrometeorological instrumentation in place around the country, from Central Australia to the Alps, covering ecosystems ranging from rainforest to alpine grasslands to mulga. Intensive monitoring is carried out at the 10 TERN Supersites which carry a suite of environmental instrumentation and perform standardised vegetation, faunal, soil and water monitoring.TERN AusCover provides a national expert network and data delivery service for provision of Australian biophysical remote sensing time-series data, continental-scale map products, and select high-resolution datasets over TERN OzFlux and Supersites. Integration of data streams and modeling is carried out through the TERN eMAST Facility. This presentation will give an overview of the infrastructure related to research in biogeochemistry through TERN. We will show how the deployment of large-scale infrastructure, observations, the curation of data and assimilation and integration of data into modelling is enhancing our process understanding of carbon uptake and water use in a large range of ecosystems.
Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment, 2004
Quantifying mass and energy exchanges within tropical forests is essential for understanding thei... more Quantifying mass and energy exchanges within tropical forests is essential for understanding their role in the global carbon budget and how they will respond to perturbations in climate. This study reviews ecosystem process models designed to predict the growth and productivity of temperate and tropical forest ecosystems. Temperate forest models were included because of the minimal number of tropical forest models. The review provides a multiscale assessment enabling potential users to select a model suited to the scale and type of information they require in tropical forests. Process models are reviewed in relation to their input and output parameters, minimum spatial and temporal units of operation, maximum spatial extent and time period of application for each organization level of modelling. Organizational levels included leaf-tree, plot-stand, regional and ecosystem levels, with model complexity decreasing as the time-step and spatial extent of model operation increases. All ec...
ABSTRACT Hyperspectral remote sensing has promised a new era in quantitative measurement of key p... more ABSTRACT Hyperspectral remote sensing has promised a new era in quantitative measurement of key properties of terrestrial systems. The high information content, mechanistic relationships between reflectance spectra and canopy, leaf and molecular properties, and combination of computing power, algorithm maturity and highly quantitative methodology provides the basis for delivery of key information into new international research and observation frameworks seeking to provide societal benefits. This paper describes current capacity of global biophysical remote sensing and defines products that could be delivered by a new sensor. New products could be particularly useful in description of ecosystem services.
Satellite technologies available in Australia today span a very large range of applications, from... more Satellite technologies available in Australia today span a very large range of applications, from telecommunications to global positioning systems and earth observation. Multi-billion dollar investments by various nations and private industry in global positioning systems and earth-observation systems have underpinned the development of agronomic applications, such as ‘Precision Agriculture’ and satellite-based estimations of feed on offer. Despite this large supply of technologies, the uptake of such remote sensing for pasture management has been minimal due to the difficulty of use of this data by non-experts and the lack of routine accessibility to support day-to-day management decisions. This paper will provide a brief description of the technology of earth observation in Australia, followed by some concrete examples of its use in baseline mapping of the diversity and extent of grasslands for monitoring of pasture condition and estimation of feed quality, in particular.
Background Earth Observation ‘EO’ remote sensing technology development enables original insights... more Background Earth Observation ‘EO’ remote sensing technology development enables original insights into vegetation function and health at ever finer temporal, spectral and spatial resolution. Research sites equipped with monitoring infrastructure such as flux towers operate at a key bridging scale between satellite platform measurements and on-the-ground leaf-level processes. Results This paper presents the technical details of the design and operation of a proximal observation system ‘THEMS’ that generates unattended long-term high quality thermal and hyperspectral images of a forest canopy on a short (sub-daily) timescale. The primary purpose of the system is to measure canopy temperature, spectral reflectance and radiance coincident with a highly instrumented flux tower site for benchmarking purposes. Basic system capability is demonstrated through low level data product descriptions of the high-resolution multi-angular imagery and ancillary data streams. The system has been succe...
IGARSS 2001. Scanning the Present and Resolving the Future. Proceedings. IEEE 2001 International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (Cat. No.01CH37217)
IGARSS 2001. Scanning the Present and Resolving the Future. Proceedings. IEEE 2001 International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (Cat. No.01CH37217), 2001
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