Moving towards commonality: An integrated chamber, gas sampling and data processing system for canopy scale measurements of trace gas fluxes using only commercially available components.

Plant mediated fluxes of trace gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, are potentially important components of the greenhouse gas budget in many ecosystems. Measurement of these fluxes is possible through a variety of methods that operate over a range of spatial scales. For measurements constrained to the canopy scale, use of large (one to a few cubic meters in volume) closed-transient chambers has been common. Lack of a single source manufacture for all components necessary for this measurement, however, has meant that historically canopy scale trace gas flux measurements have required engineering effort on the part of the researcher to achieve. This has ranged from researcher-built measurement systems where some to all components, beyond the gas analyzer(s), were custom designed and built by the researcher. While this has spurred innovation advancing this area of research, the lack of standardized tools and a data processing platform has been a key source of uncertainty in these measurements. It has also meant that these measurements have been limited to only research programs with adequate engineering resources to construct and operate such a measurement system. Here we describe integration of two different commercially available systems to provide a complete off-the-shelf solution for canopy scale trace gas flux measurement. The combined system integrates a large canopy chamber (Eosense, eosAC-LT) with a gas sampling/analysis/data processing system (LI-COR, LI-8250, LI-78xx and SoilFluxPro). We demonstrate both hardware and software integration, including data processing, and performance of the combined measurement system.