Wombat State Forest Flux Tower Energy and Mass Exchange Measurements

A collection of flux tower measurements of energy and mass exchange between the surface and atmosphere using eddy covariance techniques, processed via PyFluxPro. It originates from a secondary re-growth Eucalyptus forest in Australia, with automated soil greenhouse gas flux measurements collected from 2010 to 2016. The original tower was decommissioned in 2021 and a new one commissioned in 2024.

Use Cases

• Analyze Net Ecosystem Exchange (NEE) partitioning into Gross Primary Productivity (GPP) and Ecosystem Respiration (ER) to model forest carbon dynamics.
• Study seasonal variations in energy and mass fluxes by correlating them with the site's cool-temperate climate, characterized by temperatures between 1 and 30°C and 871 mm annual rainfall.
• Investigate the impact of forest management practices like selective harvesting and prescribed burning on measured eddy covariance fluxes.
• Examine soil greenhouse gas flux data (CO2, CH4, N2O) collected via FTIR spectrometer from 2010-2016 for soil-atmosphere interaction studies.

Strengths

• Data processed using a standardized methodology (PyFluxPro v3.4.18) as described by Isaac et al. (2017), producing a final, gap-filled product.
• Includes long-term automated soil greenhouse gas flux measurements collected coherently from 2010 to 2016.
• Site characteristics are well-documented, including dominant tree species (Eucalyptus obliqua, radiata, rubida), average canopy height of 25 m, and detailed climate data.

Limitations

• The dataset's temporal coverage is unclear; the description mixes data from the original tower (decommissioned 2021) and a new one (commissioned 2024), creating potential discontinuity.
• Key structural metadata such as row count, column names, and file size are unknown, hindering assessment of dataset scale and specific variables.
• Primary data files are in HTML and PNG formats, which are non-standard for quantitative analysis of time-series flux data and may require significant extraction effort.

Provenance

Source

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network's Data Discovery

Collection Method

Eddy covariance flux tower measurements processed using PyFluxPro software; soil greenhouse gas fluxes measured with a trailer-mounted FTIR spectrometer.

Time Range

Soil greenhouse gas flux measurements from 2010 to 2016; flux tower operational history includes decommissioning in 2021 and recommissioning in 2024.

Freshness

Metadata was last updated on 2026-03-20, but the underlying data's temporal coverage is not fully specified.

Geography

Wombat State Forest, Australia; a secondary re-growth dry sclerophyll forest.