Flux towers in the sky: global ecology from space
Citations Over TimeTop 10% of 2019 papers
Abstract
Global ecology - the study of the interactions among the Earth's ecosystems, land, atmosphere and oceans - depends crucially on global observations: this paper focuses on space-based observations of global terrestrial ecosystems. Early global ecology relied on an extrapolation of detailed site-level observations, using models of increasing complexity. Modern global ecology has been enabled largely by vegetation indices (greenness) from operational space-based imagery but current capabilities greatly expand scientific possibilities. New observations from spacecraft in orbit allowed an estimation of gross carbon fluxes, photosynthesis, biomass burning, evapotranspiration and biomass, to create virtual eddy covariance sites in the sky. Planned missions will reveal the dimensions of the diversity of life itself. These observations will improve our understanding of the global productivity and carbon storage, land use, carbon cycle-climate feedback, diversity-productivity relationships and enable improved climate forecasts. Advances in remote sensing challenge ecologists to relate information organised by biome and species to new data arrayed by pixels and develop theory to address previously unobserved scales.
Related Papers
- → THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF SKY EXPOSURE CRITERION(2006)2 cited
- → Mapping the Sky(2013)
- Sky Diving시 Sky Diver의 심리적 불안요인이 자신감에 미치는 영향(2015)