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News
August 24, 2010 - The Gros Morne flux station is now online. See our sites, and access real-time flux data here. Thanks kindly to all our partners - the National Parks Service, municipalities, and private landowners - who help facilitate this research! August 21, 2010 - FluxLab is pushing the CTFD to extremes! Having just signed an MOU with the International Centre for Terrestrial Antarctic Research, we are conducting a campaign to continuously monitor soil carbon dioxide emissions year-round in the Antarctic Dry Valleys, using a special CTFD soil sensor. June 24, 2010 - New Efflux Site in the Highlands - and more to come! June 19, 2010 - At our snowy sites, solar panels need to be mounted with at least 2.5 m high for year-round power. To celebrate the arrival of warm summer days, some of us took a lab break to run a trial setup of the Highland site tower. Video June 18, 2010 - Lab members would like to thank SpringBoard Atlantic for a new Proof-of-Concept funding award for CT-FD probes. June 14, 2010 - Field work about abounds. Several CT-FD monitoring stations are headed out this summer, on a 1200 km transect across Atlantic Canada for investigating temporal scales of variability in soil respiration. April 8, 2010 - Congrats to Claire Phillips on her new moisture-d13C fractionation paper in RCM! See it here. March 29, 2010 - Yet another award to a FluxLab member!!! Congrats to Sara Klapstein on her NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship! March 29, 2010 - More awards!!! Congrats to Sara Klapstein AND Kraig Porter for winning awards at StFX research Day, where more than 90 students presented their work. News link. March 12, 2010 - Congrats to Gordon and fellow students who were part of a StFX-based team that raised $12,500 for Haiti relief. News link. March 8, 2010 - Award! Congratulations to Kelsey O'Brien for her award-winning performance at this past weekend's APICS Environment Meeting! News link. February 1, 2010 - At the Oslo IPY meeting we will introduce our concept for a Soil Observation System for the North American Arctic. January 27, 2010 - FluxLab SpinOff wins second prize in the I3 Technology Start-Up Competition! Dave (far right) at the awards. December 21, 2009 - Six FluxLab presentations were recently given at the American Geophysical Union Meeting in San Francisco. December 12, 2009. The FluxLab is gaining momentum. With thanks to our supporters, recent funding includes:
November 20, 2009 - The FluxLab seeks postdocs and technicians. Contact Dave October 28, 2009 - Congratulations to Claire Phillips at Oregon State for a successful doctoral defense! Many thanks go out from us to Claire and Barb Bond for their commitment to our shared projects. August 17, 2009 - In our latest paper, a number of chamber methodologies used in measuring the d13C of soil respiration try to outcompete one another - in surrogate reality. Available here. See our publications page for more good reading! July 19, 2009 - Many thanks to Nelson O'Driscoll for leading the Acadia-StFX-Environment Canada Kingsport Saltmarsh team, and to Gordon for coordinating our field efforts! July 18, 2009 - Sara's summer work uses electrokinetic soil stimulation to move substrates around electrochemically within soil columns. So far, soil microbes seem indifferent. July 13, 2009 - Congrats to Fluxlab collaborators SeisMap Consulting, on their recent National Research Council R&D funding award for our collaborative projects. July 12, 2009 - Springboard Atlantic boosts FluxLab R&D capacity with a $20K Proof-of-Concept grant for our Decision Support Tool, which helps design carbon dioxide monitoring networks. July 9, 2009 - Chance Creelman is the recipient of an ACEnet fellowship! Chance is working on a Decision Support Tool to help designs carbon dioxide monitoring networks. ACEnet resources allow Chance to chew through far more simulations than would otherwise be possible. Thank you, ACEnet! June 17, 2009 - Dave, Gordon, and Sara go to Acadia to play on the tidal flats and prepare the mesocosm for tide simulations! Photo. June 6, 2009 - FluxLab is thankful to share space with the University of Regina, HTC Purenergy, and others in a New Technology Magazine article. May 24, 2009 - Gordon and Chance present work related to CT-FD carbon dioxide surface efflux probes at the AGU-CGU-GAC etc Joint Assembly Meeting in Toronto. See Gordon's poster on wintertime field work, or Chance's poster on experimental validation of the technique. May 1, 2009 - Nick, a recent NSERC PGS-D scholarship recipient (!), is now in Scotland for a few months working on isotope projects with researchers at Edinburgh. We all hope to visit! April 24, 2009 - Thanks to Vienna and the European Geophysical Union for a great meeting! April 16, 2009 - Nick's most recent paper came out today in Geophysical Research Letters. It questions the validity of oft-used Keeling plots for isotope-based research, specifically in environments where diffusion is the dominant means of transport. The paper presents alternatives for achieving better accuracy out of these studies. March 13, 2009 - Congratulations to Nick Nickerson and Amanda Diochon, who both have had papers on the Journal of Geophysical Research (Biogeosciences) most downloaded list for weeks now! February 21, 2009 - Congratulations to collaborator Claire Phillips for her Sulzman Award (from BASIN) for Best Oral Student Presentation at AGU 08!!! February 20, 2009 - See the new deployment of the flux solution probes here. February 13, 2009 - FluxLab receives $10,000 from Springboard Atlantic to help protect IP related to FluxLab/ESRC technologies. January 13, 2009 - Happy New Year! The Flux Lab was well represented at this month's AGU meeting with 5 posters/talks. Picarro chose to highlight our data (measured in the Acadia Phytotrons) in several high profile advertisements in EOS and on the inside front cover of the Nature GeoScience December issue). |
Featured Projects
Soil Observation System - Climate warming will stimulate much more GHG emission from temperate and northern soils. Monitoring of these fluxes is limited, and represents a huge research gap in modern soil science. So, we are operating a new pilot long-term observation network that will allow us to continuously monitor emissions from soil landscapes across large spaces. See the Sites. Currently, two sites from our pilot demonstration network are now streaming data through our own online viewer/analysis tool: Cape Breton Highlands, and Woods Harbour. The others will be online soon. Dave 
Isotope Dynamics - Monitoring of stable isotope signatures has become a commonplace tool through which researchers can better understand biological processes. Unfortunately transport through porous media (such as soil) often confounds their interpretation. It is possible to correct for these physical processes through mathematical modeling of the system. FluxLab is interested in these physical transport problems and has subsequently developed several isotope models now in wide usage. This year, we'll be putting this expertise to work in the field with our new Picarro analyzer, which will be used in conjunction with soil flux chambers. For more info, contact Nick . 
Cold Soil GHG Monitoring Networks - This research effort is concerned with soil carbon dioxide efflux across Canada's North, which stores a vast quantity of soil carbon, and where large climate changes and vast increases in emissions are anticipated over the coming century. Using the Canadian Regional Climate model forecasts to 2160 and other spatial datasets, we are undertaking research to project the evolution of carbon dioxide release risk over time, and are applying a Simulated Annealing algorithm to simultaneously solve for the optimal network configuration, given various factors such as climate change, distribution of carbon storage, and carbon sensitivity to temperature and moisture changes. For more info, contact Chance . 
MMV for Carbon Capture and Storage - Like the larger Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology, Measurement, Monitoring, and Verification (MMV) is, by itself, a technology suite with instruments, data acquisition, and data processing - all for the purposes of tracking leakage. The critical challenges for surface-based accounting include: overcoming natural noise; reliable instrumentation (CT-FD probe shown above) and networks; developing adequate statistical power; real-time partitioning; and statistically robust post-partitioning analysis. Dave . 
Soil Respiration into the Future - Global Climate Models (GCMs) predict change in soil carbon stocks and respiration through time, but in most cases this information is not explicitely available, as it is usually combined with aboveground C stocks. In a collaboration with Alvaro Montenegro, we are extracting soil-specific information from historic and future runs of leading GCMs. The goal is to determine the possible current distribution, and potential evolution of soil C stocks over time and space.Alvaro. |
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