Quantifying ecosystem CO₂ exchange: intercomparison of methods

The exchange of carbon dioxide (CO₂) between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere is one of the major interactions between the biosphere and the atmosphere, a key descriptor of ecosystem functioning and a major influence on atmospheric CO₂ concentration. Two empirical approaches are generally used to quantify ecosystem CO₂ exchange at the ecosystem level: the eddy-covariance technique (EC) and biometric methods (BM). In a recent publication in Nature Communications, both methods have been critically compared with respect to assessing carbon budgets of forests.

Despite pinpointing discrepancies between methods, the overall results increase the confidence for using EC technique, and they show potential improvement aspects for converging data resulting from EC and BM techniques.