Scientists, technical staff, stakeholders and guests gathered for the ICOS Germany network’s Annual Meeting in September, a year and a half after the outbreak of the corona pandemic. The hybrid meeting was hosted by colleagues from the Technical University Dresden in Tharandt, and included an excursion to the ICOS Tharandt Ecosystem station.
The meeting discussed several ongoing scientific studies and observations in all three domains. For example, the German Ecosystem stations showed how carbon dioxide (CO2) and water fluxes behave after clear cuts of forests and in forests growing on peat soils. Importance of long-term measurements was highlighted and the main meteorological and climate-related drivers for the CO2 exchange were outlined. The meeting also presented a number of methodological studies addressing the relevance of linking ICOS data streams to products from the remote sensing and modelling community. Furthermore, new results were introduced from various research activities on greenhouse gas exchange in the Baltic Sea and from instrument inter-comparisons in the Ocean domain.
Scientists from ICOS Germany are participating in a special study that was initiated with regard to the warm winter of 2019/2020 and the corona lockdown that followed it, temporary reducing traffic and industrial emissions. Another study kicking off in Germany examines how the current management of European arable sites combined with the prevailing meteorological conditions affect the CO2 fluxes and the carbon stocks in arable soils.
ICOS Germany will welcome urban measurement stations to its station network in the future. The first German urban station (eddy covariance station) will locate on the street of Rothenburgstrasse in Berlin. Germany plays an important part in the EU project called ICOS Cities, where Munich is one of the project’s three pilot cities and Heidelberg belongs to the project’s city network. The project will develop a concept for the holistic assessment of urban greenhouse gas emissions.
Picture: Excursion to the ICOS Tharandt Ecosystem station south of Dresden, Germany. Copyright: Johann Heinrich von Thünen Institute.