Mapping Ireland's Net Ecosystem CO₂ Exchange from space

Climate change poses a significant environmental challenge for humanity, and accurately predicting its intensity, as well as its impact on terrestrial ecosystems, is crucial.

To achieve this, monitoring, modelling, and mapping greenhouse gas (GHG) exchanges between the biosphere and the atmosphere is essential. Monitoring is also important to achieve the European Union's goal to achieve a balance between GHG emissions and removals by 2050 and maintain negative emissions thereafter. While in situ measurement techniques, such as the eddy covariance flux tower (ECFT), have been used for decades to measure ecosystem-level exchanges of carbon, such as Net Ecosystem Exchange (NEE) of CO₂, their footprint is limited to only 1 km².

To overcome this limitation, satellite remote sensing data has been used to upscale these measurements to regional and global scales, but previous work has relied on low-resolution remote sensing data, such as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor (at 250m or 500m spatial resolution).

This study aims to use a combination of high-resolution remote sensing data and measurements from in situ ECFT data to model the NEE of CO₂ across ~92% of Ireland's terrestrial area, covering major land covers such as wetlands (coastal and peatlands), grassland, and forestry. The model will integrate datasets from both ESA (Copernicus Sentinel-1 and 2) and NASA (MODIS PAR) with the light response curve parameters derived from the ECFT data in Ireland, to model NEE CO₂ at a national scale.

The results will be useful for monitoring, reporting, and verifying NEE across a range of ecosystems in Ireland. They can also be used to enhance National Inventory Reporting and national ambitions on climate, influence targeted policymaking, and verify land management decisions.