At Home on the Prairie: Soil Flux Chamber Measurements with Crds and the New Soil Flux Processor.

Soil flux chamber measurements remain a key tool for determining production and sequestration of direct and indirect greenhouse gas exchanges associated with range and wildland ecosystems.  The Picarro G2508 Cavity Ring-down Spectrometer has radically simplified soil flux studies by providing simultaneous measurements of five gases: CO2, CH4, N2O, NH3, and H2O, and by lending itself to field deployment. Picarro has now developed a real-time soil flux processing software (SFP) to further simplify soil flux measurements with the G2508 or the G2308 (CH4, N2O and H2O) systems. 

This SFP is designed to work with all chamber types and sizes, and to provide real-time flux values. The SFP provides a very flexible sample-ID and run-scheme GUI interface, a highly practical real-time monitoring of chamber measurement GUI interface, and a sophisticated flux analysis GUI interface.  A user-defined model selection option includes three predominant fit algorithms as default, and an open-code interface for user-composed algorithms.

Here we present methane and nitrous oxide flux data collected over 24-hour periods in a restored prairie ecosystem in Indiana, USA, that experienced a factorial combination of ambient or increased 1) rainfall variability and 2) N inputs.   Fluxes were measured using a closed system in which lab-built chambers were connected to a Picarro G2308 system.