Professor Andrew Richardson (SICCS and Ecoss) and BIO PhD student Aaron Teets (BIO) recently co-authored a paper that analyzed 25 years of carbon cycle measurements from Howland Forest, Maine. The project was led by David Hollinger (USDA Forest Service), who has been PI of the Howland AmeriFlux site since 1996. Richardson has been involved in research at Howland since 2003. The paper, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, uses what is currently the longest published time series of continuous CO2 flux measurements to investigate long-term trends and variability in patterns of CO2 uptake and release. The analysis found a small but significant trend of increasing C uptake through time, despite the period of record including some of the most climate-extreme years in the last 125. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2021JG006276
Photo courtesy of Howland Forest.