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The case for increasing the statistical power of eddy covariance ecosystem studies : why, where and how?

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Hill_et_al_2017_Global_Change_Biology.pdf (824.3Kb)
Date
06/2017
Author
Hill, Timothy
Chocholek, Melanie
Clement, Robert
Keywords
Carbon
Carbon dioxide
CO2
Eddy covariance
Effect size
Flux
Latent
Replication
Sensible
Significant
QH301 Biology
NDAS
Metadata
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Abstract
Eddy covariance (EC) continues to provide invaluable insights into the dynamics of Earth's surface processes. However, despite its many strengths, spatial replication of EC at the ecosystem scale is rare. High equipment costs are likely to be partially responsible. This contributes to the low sampling, and even lower replication, of ecoregions in Africa, Oceania (excluding Australia) and South America. The level of replication matters as it directly affects statistical power. While the ergodicity of turbulence and temporal replication allow an EC tower to provide statistically robust flux estimates for its footprint, these principles do not extend to larger ecosystem scales. Despite the challenge of spatially replicating EC, it is clearly of interest to be able to use EC to provide statistically robust flux estimates for larger areas. We ask: How much spatial replication of EC is required for statistical confidence in our flux estimates of an ecosystem? We provide the reader with tools to estimate the number of EC towers needed to achieve a given statistical power. We show that for a typical ecosystem, around four EC towers are needed to have 95% statistical confidence that the annual flux of an ecosystem is nonzero. Furthermore, if the true flux is small relative to instrument noise and spatial variability, the number of towers needed can rise dramatically. We discuss approaches for improving statistical power and describe one solution: an inexpensive EC system that could help by making spatial replication more affordable. However, we note that diverting limited resources from other key measurements in order to allow spatial replication may not be optimal, and a balance needs to be struck. While individual EC towers are well suited to providing fluxes from the flux footprint, we emphasize that spatial replication is essential for statistically robust fluxes if a wider ecosystem is being studied.
Citation
Hill , T , Chocholek , M & Clement , R 2017 , ' The case for increasing the statistical power of eddy covariance ecosystem studies : why, where and how? ' , Global Change Biology , vol. 23 , no. 6 , pp. 2154-2165 . https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.13547
Publication
Global Change Biology
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.13547
ISSN
1354-1013
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2016 The Authors Global Change Biology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
We acknowledge the support of the Natural Environment Research Council funded projects: CBESS (Coastal Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Sustainability: NE/J015644/1) and GREENHOUSE (Generating Regional Emissions Estimates with a Novel Hierarchy of Observations and Upscaled Simulation Experiments: NE/K002619/1).
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/17313

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