Automatic high-frequency measurements of full soil greenhouse gas fluxes in a tropical forest

Courtois, Elodie Alice; Stahl, Clément; Burban, Benoit; Van den Berge, Joke; Berveiller, Daniel; Bréchet, Laëtitia; Soong, Jennifer Larned; Arriga, Nicola; Peñuelas, Josep; Janssens, Ivan August

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-16-785-2019

Articles | Volume 16, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-16-785-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-16-785-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 16, issue 3

Research article

|

12 Feb 2019

Research article |

| 12 Feb 2019

Automatic high-frequency measurements of full soil greenhouse gas fluxes in a tropical forest

Elodie Alice Courtois, Clément Stahl, Benoit Burban, Joke Van den Berge, Daniel Berveiller, Laëtitia Bréchet, Jennifer Larned Soong, Nicola Arriga, Josep Peñuelas, and Ivan August Janssens

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Final revised paper (published on 12 Feb 2019)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 15 Aug 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

SC1: 'Comment on Courtois et al. manuscript', Josep Barba, 27 Aug 2018
- AC1: 'Reply to RC1', Elodie COURTOIS, 09 Nov 2018
  - AC4: 'Reply to SC1', Elodie COURTOIS, 09 Nov 2018
RC1: 'manuscript review', Anonymous Referee #1, 04 Sep 2018
- AC2: 'Reply to RC1', Elodie COURTOIS, 09 Nov 2018
RC2: 'Manuscript review', Anonymous Referee #2, 14 Sep 2018
- AC3: 'Reply to RC2', Elodie COURTOIS, 09 Nov 2018
RC3: 'Manuscript review', Anonymous Referee #3, 03 Oct 2018
- AC5: 'Reply to RC3', Elodie COURTOIS, 09 Nov 2018
SC2: 'Interactive comment on “Automatic high-frequency measurements of full soil greenhouse gas fluxes in a tropical forest” by Elodie Alice Courtois et al.', Naishen Liang, 29 Oct 2018
- AC6: 'Reply to SC2', Elodie COURTOIS, 09 Nov 2018

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (01 Dec 2018) by Kees Jan van Groenigen

AR by Elodie COURTOIS on behalf of the Authors (04 Dec 2018) Author's response

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (08 Dec 2018) by Kees Jan van Groenigen

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (21 Dec 2018)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (12 Jan 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The authors did a thorough job responding to the reviews and incorporating the comments into the manuscript. I just have two more general comments, and a few minor things to be cleaned up.

General comments
I still have one question about the flux calculation procedure. You write that all fluxes are calculated using exponential fitting in the Soil Flux pro software. Does that mean you really calculated an exponential flux for each measurement or did you use purely the results from the “Exp Flux” column? The two things are not identical. If the software decides that a linear fit is more suited for a curve, the nonlinear coefficients are set based on the linear fit.

I know it is not the primary scope of the manuscript, but it would have been nice to see a comment about the effect of the flux calculation on the calculated fluxes. There is a significant difference in the shown flux distributions when you compare Fig. 3 from the revised manuscript with Fig. 2 from the original manuscript. Most notably for N2O. This could eventually impact annual or seasonal balance estimates.

Specific comments
Page 1, line 32: Start the sentence with, “After water vapour,…”
Page 2, line 6: “change” instead of “increase (or decrease)”
Page 4: Sometimes you write “Li-“ instead of “LI-“ for the LI-COR instruments”. Also “Soil Flux pro” and “Soil flux Pro”
Page 4, line 16: Add “sensors” after “water content”
Page 5, line 21: At the end of the sentence add “if fluxes are calculated linearly.”
Page 6, line 19: “with previous or following” you mean “adjacent”, right?
Page 6, line 34: “varied” instead of “varies”
Page 7, line 11: “could” instead of “can” ; the average flux value and the uncertainty value should have the same decimal
Page 7, line 15: one redundant full stop
Page 8, line 1: “that” instead of “than”
Page 8, line 5: a comma or “and” missing before “(4)”; “could” instead of “can” (same in the N2O section);
Page 8, line 20: “displayed” instead of “display”
The conclusions can be shortened. There are some repetitions in it.
Figure 6: In contrast to what the caption says, y-axis don’t have the same limits.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (13 Jan 2019) by Kees Jan van Groenigen

AR by Elodie COURTOIS on behalf of the Authors (23 Jan 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (25 Jan 2019) by Kees Jan van Groenigen

AR by Elodie COURTOIS on behalf of the Authors (01 Feb 2019) Manuscript

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Short summary

Measuring greenhouse gases (GHGs) from a natural ecosystem remains a contemporary challenge. We tested the use of appropriate technology for the estimation of soil fluxes of the three main GHGs in a tropical rainforest for 4 months. We showed that our design allowed the continuous high-frequency measurement of the three gases in a tropical biome and provide recommendations for its implementation. This study is a major step in the estimation of the global GHG budget of tropical forests.