#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. An international team of scientists, having studied carbon fluxes in the Arctic ecosystems, created a global database ABCflux. It is based on 6000 field works and will help to estimate and predict the carbon balance together with climate change. The study is published in the EarthSystemScienceData magazine.
As the authors write, almost half of the organic carbon reserves are accumulated in the soils of the northern ecosystems. Climate warming threatens with a carbon massive release into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide and methane. To predict the phenomenon, a system of constant observation was required.
The systematizing information mechanism was the project of scientists from fifty scientific institutes. They created a standardized database of terrestrial carbon dioxide fluxes in Arctic ecosystems, Arctic-Boreal CO2 fluxes (ABCflux). Information about the phenomenon from 1989 to 2020 was taken from 250 sites spread across the tundra, forests and swamps of the North. In total, the database included 6000 monthly observations.
The study authors state a clearly small number of field observations for the scale of the Russian Far North. This is also indicated by the project partners from the Krasnoyarsk Scientific Center of the Russian Academy Sciences Siberian Branch.
“ABCflux is one of the most comprehensive databases of this kind available today. It is indispensable for future modeling, remote sensing and empirical studies aimed at understanding the carbon balance, as well as the regional and temporal variability of its fluxes”, Anatoly Prokushkin, candidate of biological sciences, the Sukachev Forest Institute laboratory head summed up.
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Text: Ekaterina Maksimova, Photo: Olga Alexandrova