As climates change, and as atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases continue to increase, there is a demand for greater accuracy and precision in methods and models for carbon and water accounting at multiple scales. Furthermore, there is a pressing global need to include managed ecosystems – especially agriculture – in regional, national, and international carbon and water inventories. In this project, we will combine carbon and water flux measurements from our unique mobile eddy covariance (EC) system with Earth observation (EO) satellite data to develop quantitative tools for measuring and assessing carbon capture and storage and water cycles in agricultural systems at landscape scale.

At present, EC installations are overwhelmingly biased to ‘natural’ ecosystems such as forests and shrublands. We will combine our unmatched and unique mobile EC systems for Australian ecosystems with international expertise in cleaning and transforming EC data in preparation for modelling analysis. We will then upscale this combined capacity for quantifying fluxes from EC tower footprints (m² to Ha scales) to larger scales of thousands of km².  This will involve combining mobile EC flux measurements with multispectral and hyperspectral satellite imagery and satellite-based atmospheric measurements via a model that infers the carbon and water fluxes for specific land cover types and atmospheric conditions. The primary outcome of this Phase 1 activity will be a proof-of-concept EC data analysis pipeline suitable for inferring carbon and water fluxes. This project will be a technical demonstrator for a Phase 2 activity to develop an Australian map of the atmosphere-land carbon and water cycles across all agricultural land.