INETFLUX: Innovative technologies cross scales to disentangle carbon dioxide and evapotranspiration fluxes of forests
Context
The INETFLUX project brings together Czech (Global Change Research Institute CAS / GCRI – CzechGlobe) and Swiss research institutions (ETH Zürich and WSL) to advance our understanding of forest fluxes under climate change. Moreover, INETFLUX aims to strengthen bilateral cooperation, deepen international integration, and build research capacity across Europe.
The cooperation focuses specifically on the net ecosystem exchange of CO2 (NEE) and evapotranspiration (ET), which are key processes determining the role of forests as carbon sinks and their capacity to modulate the land-surface energy balance through transpiration. In addition, both processes are increasingly affected by droughts, heatwaves, and water stress.
Project aims
The research objectives of INETFLUX are to develop and validate new approaches for partitioning NEE and ET into their individual components, i.e., gross primary production (GPP) and ecosystem respiration, as well as transpiration and evaporation, and to identify the environmental drivers that regulate these processes. This will be achieved by combining advanced methods across spatial scales: stable isotope analyses and sap flow measurements at the individual tree level, eddy covariance observations of energy and matter fluxes at the stand level, machine learning approaches (XGB algorithm, SHAP values), and remote sensing techniques with high spatial and spectral resolution. Research will be carried out at three sites: Davos, external page Bílý Kříž and external page Lanžhot, representing different climatic conditions and species compositions.