Descrizione

In order to support efforts towards carbon neutrality, administrations and policy makers require dependable data on CO2 source/sink strenght of the natural and managed ecosystems in their region/country. The Italian province of South Tyrol, despite its smalls size, is fortunate to have a dense network of field sites across the major ecosystem types at which the net ecosystem-atmosphere exchange of CO2 (NEP) is quantified using the eddy covariance (EC) method. Within the proposed project we aim at capitalizing on these past and ongoing EC measurements and will develop a remote sensing-driven monitoring system of the province-level carbon fluxes in South Tyrol. 

The activities within the proposed project include: 

• (i) Continuation of the ongoing EC measurements, quality control, standardization and harmonisation of past EC measurements;
• (ii) processing and ground-truthing of satellite-based remote sensing data, which are then 
• (iii) used together with the EC data in a modelling framework to estimate province-scale NEP; 
• (iv) quantification of lateral carbon fluxes in agricultural and forest ecosystems in order to derive the net biome productivity (NBP) and 
• (v) provisioning of project results in the form of web-based visualizations to the general public. To achieve the project goals, the consortium includes partners with complementary expertise in model-data fusion, micrometeorology and remote sensing from the University of Innsbruck, the Free University of Bolzano and the European Academy of Bolzano. 

Partner

Lead Partner Università di Innsbruck, Partner Eurac Research, Partner Libera Università di Bolzano