About this Research Topic

Background

Major efforts for understanding and quantifying greenhouse gas (GHG) production and consumption are currently being developed around the world, as well as on how climate change will influence ecosystem functioning and their GHG emissions. These efforts include the monitoring of GHG fluxes doing manual and continuous measurements mainly with eddy covariance and closed chamber techniques, but also other methods such as animal respiration chambers. These measurements can be used for calibrating the models that estimate global budgets and simulate ecosystems’ functioning and their responses to climate change.

Despite these efforts, there is a large concentration of these measurements in certain areas of the world (i.e., North America and Europe), while low- and middle-income countries in the Global South are underrepresented. At the same time, these are regions with fast population growth and land-use change, thereby potentially creating critical uncertainties in global GHG budgets.

The lack of measurements and estimations in some parts of the world is explained by several factors, including the lack of monetary and human resources, inaccessibility, and political instability. This situation potentially generates errors in the predictions of the models for these underrepresented areas because due to a lack of local data, it is often assumed that ecosystems in these areas behave identically to those sampled in similar biomes, ecosystem types, or plant functional types, despite differences in ecosystem characteristics and management. This gap in data availability potentially generates a critical bias for the predictions at global scale.

This Research Topic aims at facilitating the communication of results from studies that have measured or estimated greenhouse gas fluxes and budgets in underrepresented areas or the world. We encourage the submission of original research articles focused on the following themes, both from natural and anthropogenic ecosystems:

• Direct discrete or continuous GHG flux measurements at the ecosystem level

• Direct discrete or continuous measurements of soil GHG fluxes

• Direct discrete or continuous measurements of aquatic GHG fluxes (e.g. rivers, lakes, water pans)

• Direct discrete or continuous measurements of ecosystem components in laboratory trials (e.g.

animals or animal manure)

• Indirect estimations of GHG fluxes and inventories

• Development of emission factors for agricultural activities

Keywords: carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, representativeness, climate change

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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