October conferences
It was a busy October, as I attended two conferences. The first trip was to attend the NSF Research Coordination Network FORECAST (Forecasts Of Resource and Environmental Changes: Data Assimilation Science and Technology) conference in Woods Hole, MA. It was a great trip and I learned a lot about using data assimilation techniques in ecology and environmental science. I hope to use data assimilation in my future work to better understand environmental drivers of CH4 flux to the atmosphere. At this conference I presented a poster on the last chapter of my dissertation research, where I combine data from mobile and permanent eddy covariance towers along with a 2-D flux footprint model and satellite imagery to understand variability in wetland CO2 and CH4 fluxes.
It was a rather cloudy and overcast trip to Woods Hole. All the better for learning about data assimilation indoors!
The second meeting was the 7th Biennial Bay-Delta Science Conference in Sacramento, CA, a gathering of many Delta researchers working on everything from fish genetics to land-use economics. At this conference I gave a talk outlining the primary differences in the CO2 and CH4 budgets at three of the Baldocchi Lab Bay Delta field sites: a drained pasture, a rice paddy, and a restored wetland. The group at this conference had particular interests in using land-use change for ecosystem carbon sequestration, so it was a great opportunity to communicate how effective these strategies might be based on the many years of data we've collected in the Biomet Lab.
And now it's time to get ready for the AGU conference. I'll be giving a talk on Thursday at 1:55pm in the session B43J: Biosphere-Atmosphere Greenhouse Gas Fluxes in Terrestrial Ecosystems III titled, "Incorporating spatial heterogeneity into the measurement of methane and carbon dioxide fluxes from a restored wetland." Hope to see many of you at the meeting!
Autumn fieldwork
Autumn is my favorite season, and it's a great time to do fieldwork in the Delta since temperatures are a bit more pleasant and it's fun to analyze our trace gas flux data as the plants wind down for the year. Throughout the summer we've been collecting methane and carbon dioxide flux data from a mobile tower at a restored wetland site (in addition to our permanent tower at the same site), which we've been moving between two locations to analyze spatial variability in the fluxes.
Remounting the methane sensor with Dennis after moving the mobile tower.
I'll be presenting the data and analysis from this project at the upcoming NSF RCN Forecast conference in Woods Hole, MA from 9-11 October and also at this year's AGU meeting in December.
