Carbon and water fluxes over a temperate Eucalyptus forest and a tropical wet/dry savanna in Australia

Carbon and water fluxes have been measured in two contrasting ecosystems in Australia, a cool-temperate Eucalyptus forest and a tropical wet/dry savanna. These are among the first hourly, multi-annual measurements of the energy, water and carbon fluxes in two ecosystems that are so important to Australia’s water and carbon cycling, and hence they are an important dataset for developing, testing and constraining terrestrial biogeochemical models.

This paper presents: (1) a description of the measurement program, the sites and their climatologies; (2) the key findings including the monthly and seasonal variability of fluxes, the climatic and environmental factors that determine this variation, the annual carbon and water balances, and how these compare with other measurements and other ecosystems; and (3) a comparison between the measurements and predictions of leaf area index (LAI) and gross primary production (GPP) from the MODIS remote sensing data products.