Ecological Research Aircraft with Remote Sensing and Flux Instrumentation

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This proposal is to purchase and equip a very-light aircraft (RANS S-12 Airaile) with remote sensing instruments (e.g. ground penetrating radar, infrared digital multispectral camera, hyperspectral radiometer, and high-speed true and false color video), net CO2, H2O vapor, energy balance sensors (NOAA-ATDD Mobile Flux Platform), and meteorological sensors. This instrumentation will provide users with integrated ecophysiological and biophysical data for arctic tundra and semi-arid shrubland and woodland ecosystems, and builds on existing research efforts by all users who have ongoing ecosystem research programs sponsored by NSF (OPP) and others (e.g. DOE, NIGEC, EPRI, and USGS). By combining instruments and research needs on a single aircraft, a dedicated reliable system for integrated data collection will be established. This aircraft fills a critical need of a group of researchers from several universities and agencies working on the effects of global change and on ecosystem and landscape processes in the arctic and southwest US. Projected ecological factors, such as impending climate change and increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases, have the potential to alter global ecosystem structure and function. These regional and global phenomena highlight the importance of large-scale, process-based research. For example, although much process-based C balance research has recently been conducted, the challenges of scaling these predominantly plot-level estimates of ecosystem C exchange has been hampered by the inability to directly assess the scaled, regional-level estimates. The technology for directly assessing regional C balance and the biophysical controls on ecosystem C balance has recently become available. Aircraft platforms have been used extensively in recent initiatives to determine net CO2, H20, and energy exchange of terrestrial ecosystems (FIFE, ABLE 3 A, BOREAS, and NSF-LAII), and when linked with remote sensing instrument ation, significant progress has been made in understanding spatial feed backs between surface features and ecosystem C exchange.