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Abstract

One of the foremost challenges for ecologists is to integrate observations made at a range of scales so that they become useful to others working at a different scale. An example of this would be scaling observations of carbon and water exchange made at leaf or plot scale to be of direct use to global climate modelers. Micrometeorological techniques, which operate at intermediate scales to these two extremes, are being used increasingly to validate and parameterize such models (Baldocchi and Meyers 1998). In turn, micrometeorological techniques can be validated against suitably scaled observations at a smaller scale. Progress in closing the carbon budget for example, must rely on such an interdisciplinary approach. When made in combination with detailed biophysical field experiments, such observations can reveal the atmospheric and biophysical variables that control carbon and water exchange. In this review, we describe briefly the most common micrometeorological methods used to measure fluxes of carbon and water at the scale of the canopy, focusing in particular on the direct techniques of eddy covariance and eddy accumulation. We also describe flux measurements at related scales that are commonly used to give added value to canopy-scale fluxes.

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Moncrieff, J.B., Jarvis, P.G., Valentini, R. (2000). Canopy Fluxes. In: Sala, O.E., Jackson, R.B., Mooney, H.A., Howarth, R.W. (eds) Methods in Ecosystem Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1224-9_12

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