Abstract
Tropical ecosystems experience particularly fast transformations largely as a consequence of land use and climate change. Consequences for ecosystem functioning and services are hard to predict and require analyzing multiple data sets simultaneously. Today, we are equipped with a wide range of spatio-temporal observation-based data streams that monitor the rapid transformations of tropical ecosystems in terms of state variables (e.g., biomass, leaf area, soil moisture) but also in terms of ecosystem processes (e.g., gross primary production, evapotranspiration, runoff). However, the underexplored joint potential of such data streams, combined with deficient access to data and processing, constrain our understanding of ecosystem functioning, despite the importance of tropical ecosystems in the regional-to-global carbon and water cycling. Our objectives are: 1. To facilitate access to regional “Analysis Ready Data Cubes” and enable efficient processing 2. To contribute to the understanding of ecosystem functioning and atmosphere-biosphere interactions. 3. To get a dynamic perspective of environmental conditions for biodiversity. To achieve our objectives, we developed a regional variant of an “Earth System Data Lab” (RegESDL) tailored to address the challenges of northern South America. The study region extensively covers natural ecosystems such as rainforest and savannas, and includes strong topographic gradients (0–6,500 masl). Currently, environmental threats such as deforestation and ecosystem degradation continue to increase. In this contribution, we show the value of the approach for characterizing ecosystem functioning through the efficient implementation of time series and dimensionality reduction analysis at pixel level. Specifically, we present an analysis of seasonality as it is manifested in multiple indicators of ecosystem primary production. We demonstrate that the RegESDL has the ability to underscore contrasting patterns of ecosystem seasonality and therefore has the potential to contribute to the characterization of ecosystem function. These results illustrate the potential of the RegESDL to explore complex land-surface processes and the need for further exploration. The paper concludes with some suggestions for developing future big-data infrastructures and its applications in the tropics.
Highlights
Novel data streams in the Earth system sciences are becoming available at unprecedented rates (Boulton, 2018)
We developed a regional Earth System Data Lab (RegESDL) for northern South America to facilitate big-data analytics efficiently based on cloud infrastructures
The main contributors to PC1 are different along the regions (Supplementary Figure S3), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) contributed the most in arid and semiarid regions such as the Caribbean and Orinoquia savannas and at the Pacific coast of Ecuador and Peru, whereas enhanced vegetation index (EVI) is the larger contributor in the Amazon and Biographic Choco i.e., the wettest regions
Summary
Novel data streams in the Earth system sciences are becoming available at unprecedented rates (Boulton, 2018). In the Earth system sciences, we expect a deeper understanding of a wide range of processes that remain to be insufficiently understood today (Scholze et al, 2017; Gentine et al, 2018; Reichstein et al, 2019) These data have large potential to reduce uncertainties in the quantification of global hydrological fluxes (Miralles et al, 2011; Beck et al, 2016; Ciabatta et al, 2018; Shen et al, 2018), atmosphere-biosphere exchange of carbon, water and energy (Dorigo et al, 2011, 2017; Green et al, 2017; Konings and Gentine, 2017; Papagiannopoulou et al, 2017; Ryu et al, 2019; Jung et al, 2020), the estimation of biodiversity patterns (Asner et al, 2015; Ma et al, 2020), and the interactions of all these processes as mediated by key ecosystem functional properties (Reichstein et al, 2014; Musavi et al, 2015; He et al, 2019). Big-data perspectives of this kind in the Earth system context are highly relevant to improve our understanding of ecological processes, e.g., effects of land use and climate change, and other fundamental transformations on the functioning of land ecosystems
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