Direct Flux Measurements for Immediate Societal Benefits: Clear Guidance, Modern Automation, Resource Sharing, Professional Services, and Weather Station-Inspired Approach

Continental-scale research infrastructures and flux networks (e.g., AmeriFlux, AsiaFlux, ChinaFlux, ICOS, NEON, OzFlux), alongside smaller GHG flux networks and individual sites, assess CO2, CH4, and other GHG exchange, as well as evapotranspiration (ET), between ecosystems and the atmosphere. Over four decades, these flux stations have expanded to 2100+ stationary measurement points and various campaign sites, informing long-term climate modeling.

Despite the potential of these high-resolution measurements for measuring GHG emissions and ET, their applications still rarely extend beyond academia due to the perceived complexity of the method, actual complexity and cost of current instrumentation and site operation, lack of broad geographic data coverage, and absence of a comprehensive approach focused on using direct flux measurements for immediate societal benefits.

This presentation continues to address these challenges by simplifying explanations, offering detailed guides for method understanding, developing lower-cost simpler-to-use automated flux instrumentation and networks, facilitating peer-to-peer cross-sharing to reduce data gaps and station setup costs, and providing professional services for experiment design and executions. All of these allow adopting an overall approach inspired by current automated weather stations (AWS) feeding and tuning remote sensing products and resulting in weather modeling and forecasting.

In the most recent developments, in early 2025, three new guides on direct real-time dMRV/aMRV/MMRV of all carbon pools will be published. These guides aim to optimize costs, de-risk dMRV systems, create premium carbon products, develop standardized frameworks, and assist in writing protocols for carbon sequestration and credit verification. The books include:

• Harvesting Carbon: Fields & Grasslands
• Harvesting Carbon: Forests, Orchards, and Wooded Wetlands
• Harvesting Carbon: Lakes, Ponds, and Wetlands

These latest publications aim to fundamentally change carbon markets by providing a direct, defensible, traceable, repeatable, real-time, evidence-based approach to quantify sequestration and emission.

The ultimate goal of this presentation is to ignite discussions on utilizing these guides and direct flux measurements at large to help practical decision-making applications to benefit society, and identify current needs, ideas, and examples for leveraging flux data in everyday decision contexts.