Monday, April 06, 2009

Think Dirt-y and Gassy Thoughts

The title about sums up this stage of my research as well as the state of my stomach (well, the gassy part). I'm currently grounded at home with a very bad case of the stomach flu (and wanted to be considerate of my colleagues, nobody enjoys a constant flux of H2S or repeated 5 meter dashes). I wanted to use the word "Soil" but Soil-y thoughts didn't sound as amusing to me. I survived my soil-landscape modeling midterm and got a pretty good score. Now it's time for me to do the real fun part of the class: the quantitative analysis exercise, which is the final for the class. So I did a literature review on eddy covariance tower footprints so that made me think a lot of gassy thoughts. I might be actually doing this over the summer along with some evapotranspiration modeling on top of NEE (net ecosystem exchange).

Anyway, why the dirty thoughts? Because I realized that I only have 3 eddy tower sites in north-central FL... but I have tons and tons of soil data as well as forest growth increment data. Also, NEE is *usually* closely correlated with NPP because NEE is the CO2 in/out of the ecosystem, while NPP (net primary productivity) is the carbon lost/gained by the primary producers (ie, plants)... which are pretty close even if NEE is gas only and NPP deals with solid stuff. So yeah now I'm thinking for this little final for the soil-landscape modeling (and my summer's work on top of footprint modeling and ET), I'll try to simulate NPP over a larger scale. There are a lot models out there for estimating NPP from growth increment data because foresters are really interested in how much wood you can get from a given stand so there's tons of allometric equations out there. My brain is churning and turning now!

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