Remote Sensing of Water Systems – UZH

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FLUO4ECO

FLUO4ECO

Context:

Detailed assessments of gross primary productivity (GPP) and transpiration (T), both related to the highly dynamic process of oxygenic plant photosynthesis (PS), are essential to understand and predict consequences of global environmental change and successfully define mitigation strategies. Besides modelling, several measurement approaches nowadays exist to quantify GPP and T, including remote sensing (RS) and eddy covariance (EC) measurements. Cross scale consistency and comparability of available approaches is not yet achieved. A recent study even suggests that RS based assessments are biased and underestimate the response of environmental drivers on productivity at global scale. Fluorescence spectroscopy, an emerging field in RS, could enable ground breaking advances: Core of this new approach is the measurement of a faint fluorescence (SIF) signal induced by sun light and emitted by plant’s chlorophyll during the process of PS. The mechanistic link to PS suggests SIF as indicative for ecosystem GPP and T. Exploiting the full capacity of SIF in combination with complementary information is essential to eventually provide sensitive RS approaches for assessments of ecosystem GPP and T.

Project aims:

FLUO4ECO aims to provide consistent, sensitive and unbiased RS data products to advance research of ecosystem PS and gas exchange including GPP and T. Our project is divided in four tasks:

  1. Develop physical based methods for consistent across scale retrieval of full SIF emission signals.
  2. Advance the exploitation of radiance measurements to retrieve essential complementary PS information.
  3. Use 3D virtual environments to compensate insensitivity of RS for vertical process dynamics.
  4. Impact assessment and benchmarking of new RS data for gas exchange estimates.

Outcome:

Expected approaches will allow moving towards mechanistic assessment of ecosystem functioning. The project directly contributes to a substantial international investment in Earth observation (EO) infrastructure, European Space Agency’s upcoming Fluorescence Explorer (FLEX) satellite mission.

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Timeframe:

  • 2021-2024

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