Progress in implementing diverse strategies to enhance the understanding of water vapor and greenhouse gas fluxes across varied land covers in tropical regions

The tropics play a pivotal role in the terrestrial energy and water cycles, as well as regulating the carbon cycle. The increasing pressures over the remaining natural vegetation areas in Brazilian tropical forests, allied to climate change, are likely expected to alter these cycles. Despite the existence of studies that have already observed changes on water and energy fluxes, questions regarding heat and mass exchange mechanisms and the biophysical processes in tropical ecosystems and crops for food and energy production remain. In order to enhance the knowledge towards these research questions, in-situ monitoring with high spatial and temporal resolutions are needed. This project aims to use and validate advanced approaches used to monitor and model water vapor, energy, and greenhouse gases (GHG) fluxes through in situ monitoring (sampling) in strategic land covers and forest ecosystems. With this purpose, besides a fixed-continuous monitoring in a wooded Cerrado (a tropical woodland) equipped with an Eddy Covariance system, a mobile set up monitoring system to water and energy fluxes, and GHG concentrations measurements will be used in different areas. This system will be a non-steady-state flux chamber connected to a closed-path gas analyzer. The target monitoring areas include different land covers (soybean, pasture, sugar cane, and other agricultural areas) and undisturbed areas (wooded Cerrado and riparian vegetation). The expected outcomes will contribute to improve methodologies and models through the better comprehension of the dynamics and the shifts of the water, energy and GHG fluxes. After the in-situ monitoring following a representative sampling criteria to catch both seasonal and spatial variabilities to measure the selected fluxes, mathematical models will be calibrated to allow the expansion of the timeseries and simulations including possible variations in the input variables. Afterwards, the observations, parameters, and simulations will serve as input for hydrological repositories, carbon inventories, and new contributions about water, energy, and carbon fluxes in a tropical region. Disclaimer: This abstract describes an ongoing project. Please note that it does not contain any results or conclusions, as the work is still in progress.