Flux towers in the sky: global ecology from space

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The New phytologist 2019-10, Vol.224 (2), p.570-584
Main Authors: Schimel, David, Schneider, Fabian D.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
biodiversity
biomass
carbon
Earth, Planet
Ecosystem
evapotranspiration
gross primary productivity (GPP)
Models, Biological
Plants
remote sensing
Satellite Imagery
solar‐induced fluorescence
spectroscopy
Tansley review
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0028-646X
1469-8137
DOI:10.1111/nph.15934