The pine aforestation carbon dioxide exchange measurements – case study Tuczno, Poland

Fast population growth and constantly increasing industrial activities of the human being cause globally observed changes of both chemical and physical properties of the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide concentration raise is the most often pointed out atmospheric process since the CO2 is one of the most important greenhouse gas related to civilization development. CO2 plays also an important role as a main chemical part of photosynthesis process, thus interaction between vegetation activity and the atmospheric CO2 concentration is one of the most interesting issues for environmentalists. The enormous amount of CO2 photosynthesised by forests every year makes this ecosystems one of the biggest terrestrial carbon pool on the Earth. There is a noticeable positive trend of afforestations in the Polish landscape. This is the result of governmental policy which plans to afforest up to 30% of the country area until 2050. Recently the eddy covariance has been the most common method for measuring of carbon dioxide exchange between forest and the atmosphere. It enables to conduct the observations in the scale of the whole ecosystem. This method requires accurate measurements of both vertical wind speed component and CO2 concentration fluctuations with a minimum 10 Hz sampling rate. Several observations are carried out with EC towers over the forest ecosystems worldwide, however such type of measurements were just started in Poland at the beginning of 2008. The first Polish forest CO2 exchange measuring station is located in Tuczno - Western Poland. This is 52-year old mainly pine (Pinus silvestris) afforestation. The eddy covariance (EC) system is installed at a 38-meter tall tower, approximately 18 meters above the forest canopy. This station has been established and operated by the scientists of Agrometeorology Department, Poznan University of Life Sciences with strong financial and technical support of The State Forests National Forest Holding. The micrometeorological measurements were augmented with both ground-based and airborne laser scanning of the aboveground standing biomass. The combination of both EC and laser scanning methods will improve the carbon allocation assessment.

This poster presents the achievements in the development of the station infrastructure and operation. It shows also the initial results of Tuczno forest carbon dioxide exchange studies.