I just ended my first field season with the Commane group! I used an Aeris instrument to measure soil fluxes of carbonyl sulfide (OCS) at Harvard Forest. The goal of the project is to constrain soil OCS fluxes during fall senescence, a large uncertainty in current models that use OCS as a proxy for gross primary productivity. We suspect that OCS uptake by soils continues after fall senescence, when photosynthesis is largely assumed to be negligible and soil respiration continues. The results from this project will help us understand the decoupling of OCS and CO2 fluxes in fall to better constrain our models.
This work is part of our NSF project with Daniel Obrist at UMass Lowell.
Thank you, Harvard Forest, our collaborators, and Dr. Bodhi the Dog for all their help this field season!
