Seminar and Events Schedule

Dr. Gavin McNicol will present on FLUXNET-CH4 synthesis activity: Data-driven modeling of wetland methane fluxes from sites to the globe. Dr. McNicol is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He obtained his PhD in ecosystem science at the University of California at Berkeley in 2016. His current research explores ecosystem-climate interactions across microbial to planetary scales with a focus on quantifying soil carbon stocks and greenhouse gas fluxes in wet environments including wetlands, temperate rainforests, and waste systems.

Atmospheric methane is rising at an unprecedented rate and now accounts for a quarter of contemporary climate change. Wetlands represent the largest natural source of methane but emissions estimates and their response to warming remains uncertain. Here I will present new data and model products arising from the FLUXNET-CH4 synthesis activity, which was launched in 2018 with the long-term goal to reduce wetland methane source uncertainties by compiling existing and facilitating new surface methane flux observations. I will first recount the development of the FLUXNET-CH4 Version 1.0 dataset, which contains ~4.5 million half-hourly methane flux observations across 81 terrestrial sites globally. I will then discuss two FLUXNET-CH4 machine learning applications in wetland methane flux gap-filling and global upscaling, with a focus on method advances for model validation and uncertainty quantification.