CHIHUAHUAN DESERT PROJECTS

The Chihuahuan Desert is the largest in North America, stretching from central Mexico into the US South-West, and is one of the most bio-diverse deserts in the world.

Drylands cover ~41% of the global land surface, support the livelihood of around 1 billion people and are home to uniquely adapted animals and plants. Drylands may also play a critical role in regulating terrestrial ecosystems carbon and mitigate human carbon emissions. Yet, drylands are often regarded as ‘marginal land’ and suffer from severe degradation due to lack of stewardship, growing human demand for water and land, and the threat of a drier and more variable climate. Dryland systems are also under-represented in ecosystem studies which limits our ability to detect and predict change.

The combination of high-frequency CO2 flux and spectral indices will allow us to explicitly relate CO2 and plant dynamics. By linking high frequency CO2 flux and simple RGB camera-derived landscape greenness measurements with weekly phenophase observations and sophisticated hyperspectral photography we will be able to deconvolute dryland ecosystem dynamics from the highest resolution possible to the highest resolution necessary. The next step is to explore the extrapolation of site-level spectral indices across remote stretches of desert using satellite imagery.

Tramline Pictures

Phenology Pictures

daily pictures at noon for 2015