New Software Package Helps Scientists Find Flux

Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences

Measuring atmospheric fluxes of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide helps scientists understand Earth’s carbon cycle and other biogeochemical processes, as well as how climate change affects them.

The static chamber method is a widely used flux measurement technique that involves enclosing a system of interest—such as a volume of soil, water, and plant life—in a sealed chamber. For example, a cylinder with an airtight lid can be inserted into soil, and scientists can then measure and analyze how the gas concentrations in the enclosed system change over time. New tools such as infrared gas analyzers can capture frequent readings—once every second, for example—creating large, detailed datasets that can be challenging to analyze efficiently.

Ensuring that research into greenhouse gas fluxes is open and reproducible means that open-access code must be available to researchers. Several code packages in R, the open-source programming language often used for data analysis, are designed to help researchers compile, calculate, and analyze greenhouse gas fluxes. But many of these require users to preprocess raw data files, which can be time-consuming and lead to inconsistencies between the analysis techniques of different research groups. And some packages cannot capture individual fluxes or transfer information from one program to another.

Wilson et al. developed a new R package intended as a more versatile, useful tool to catalog greenhouse gas fluxes measured in static chamber experiments. Dubbed fluxfinder, the package allows users to sort through data gathered from infrared gas analyzers more easily than existing code packages do, match data and metadata, generate visual representations and plots of the data to highlight trends and diagnose anomalies, and compute greenhouse gas fluxes. Fluxfinder also can easily be integrated with gasfluxes, another package that offers robust analysis of some datasets. The researchers note that fluxfinder facilitates reproducible greenhouse gas flux estimations, which are increasingly important in understanding the changing climate. (Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JG008208, 2024)

—Rebecca Owen (@beccapox), Science Writer

Citation: Owen, R. (2024), New software package helps scientists find flux, Eos, 105, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EO240500. Published on 13 November 2024.

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