MAIOLICA

Modelling And experIments On Land-surface Interactions with atmospheric Chemistry and climAte

Aim

• to improve our understanding of fundamental processes that contribute to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, including CH₄, N₂O, CO₂, and H₂O, from temperate mid-latitude terrestrial and lake ecosystems and
• to investigate the interactions and feedbacks among the terrestrial biosphere, the atmospheric composition and climate.

Approach

The activities in MAIOLICA can be subdivided into three activities:

1. Experiments at local and regional scales where we distinguish between the local terrestrial, the local hydrological and the regional levels
2. Soil/land/vegetation modeling at local, regional and global scales.
3. Atmospheric modeling at regional and global scales.

The contribution of the Grassland Sciences group falls into the first activity, carrying out experiments at local terrestrial and regional scales.

Objectives (local experiments)

• to quantify net GHG budgets (H₂O, CO₂, CH₄) of managed ecosystems (grasslands, cropland, mixed and monoculture forests).
• to identify functional relationships between GHG fluxes and their drivers though field measurements and experimental manipulations that simulate the feedbacks between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. These results will be used to improve terrestrial biogeochemistry models.
• to develop and apply innovative, novel methodology (laser systems, mobile flux station, stable isotopes) to partition net ecosystem fluxes into their composite fluxes, and to gain insight into the origin, magnitude and variability of GHG fluxes.

Objectives (regional experiments)

On the regional scale, we seek to bridge the gap between point source information of local terrestrial and hydrological experiments and the process-related modeling in the second activity. Therefore, we will use measurements from the local experiments and combine these with airborne measurements at the regional scale, using a small research aircraft operated by the private company external page METAIR AG. The objectives are:

• to examine whether the proposed observations and experiments over terrestrial and lake systems adequately cover the small-scale (e.g. about 100 km²) variability of the land-use and land-cover conditions of the Swiss plateau.
• to determine whether the small-scale measurements provide GHG fluxes that can be used to validate numerical models of climate-land interactions using the currently coarse horizontal grid resolution of a few hundreds of kilometers.