A new approach for estimating gross primary production
Abstract
Quantifying photosynthesis at the global scale is a long-standing goal of ecology, with implications for our understanding of global change, biodiversity, and agriculture. While the biochemistry of photosynthesis at the leaf-level is well characterized, ecosystem and regional estimates of gross primary production (GPP) remain highly uncertain. We present a new technique that reconciles measurements of solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence with traditional reflectance-based remote sensing. This allows us to make use of existing sensors, such as MODIS, to estimate GPP as the product of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation and light-use efficiency. Our approach shows strong agreement with statistically upscaled estimates of GPP, as well as site-level measurements of GPP. Appealing to ecological theory, we discuss the apparent generality of our result across multiple scales and how it relates to plant physiology. To further demonstrate the usefulness of our approach, we use this single scaling parameter to estimate the global, terrestrial flux of photosynthesis at 120 Pg yr-1, a result which agrees well with existing estimates.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFM.B53L..03B
- Keywords:
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- 0402 Agricultural systems;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 0428 Carbon cycling;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 0439 Ecosystems;
- structure and dynamics;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 0480 Remote sensing;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES