New wind beneath the wings for airborne landscape greenhouse gas flux assessments

Global change affects all greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes making our future uncertain.

Current GHG inventories and modeling frameworks suffer from severe data scarcity because current GHG flux measurement methods are costly or complicated and are difficult to extrapolate.

Hence quantification and regulation remain uncertain for many of the landscape-distributed GHG fluxes that are greater than the fossil fluxes on a gross-basis and can be highly climate sensitive.This project offers the first large scale habitat-specific landscape GHG flux measurements with UAV-based approaches that measures all that is needed on-board, i.e. with all variables being co-determined in space and time that is independent from other data (iUAV). iUAV GHG approaches, as just developed by the project team, will be evaluated and designed for large scale use, implemented to map habitat fluxes hypothesizing that a number of potentially large but not yet properly quantified fluxes are key for overall budgets, make comprehensive studies of land-use effects on GHG fluxes possible, and deliver spatially well-constrained full landscape flux measurements for methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide.This project is a game changer towards much more convenient observation-based GHG assessments, enabling proper support for modelling and better understanding of flux regulation, as well as for the critical need to verify mitigation commitments towards the Paris agreement.