Airborne observations reveal elevational gradient in tropical forest isoprene emissions

Dasa Gu,Maoyi Huang,Rodrigo Augusto Ferreira De Souza,Fernando C Santos,Scot T Martin,John E Shilling,Trissevgeni Stavrakou,Paulo Artaxo,Saewung Kim,Manish Shrivastava,Oscar Vega,Chun Zhao,Alex Guenther ,Guoyong Leng,Eliane Gomes Alves ,Karla M Longo,Ying Liu,Haofei Yu,Roger Seco,J Tóta ,Qing Yang,Zhiyuan Hu

doi:10.1038/ncomms15541

Abstract

Isoprene dominates global non-methane volatile organic compound emissions, and impacts tropospheric chemistry by influencing oxidants and aerosols. Isoprene emission rates vary over several orders of magnitude for different plants, and characterizing this immense biological chemodiversity is a challenge for estimating isoprene emission from tropical forests. Here we present the isoprene emission estimates from aircraft eddy covariance measurements over the Amazonian forest. We report isoprene emission rates that are three times higher than satellite top-down estimates and 35% higher than model predictions. The results reveal strong correlations between observed isoprene emission rates and terrain elevations, which are confirmed by similar correlations between satellite-derived isoprene emissions and terrain elevations. We propose that the elevational gradient in the Amazonian forest isoprene emission capacity is determined by plant species distributions and can substantially explain isoprene emission variability in tropical forests, and use a model to demonstrate the resulting impacts on regional air quality.

Highlights

Isoprene dominates global non-methane volatile organic compound emissions, and impacts tropospheric chemistry by influencing oxidants and aerosols
To accurately simulate the spatiotemporal distribution of isoprene emissions with MEGAN, it is critical to drive the model with representative land cover input data including emission factors (EFs), plant functional type (PFT) and leaf area index (LAI)
The MEGAN v2.1 model adopts the 16 PFT scheme used by Community Land Model (CLM) to characterize spatial variations of vegetation types, and specifies isoprene EFs based on PFT categories[12]

Summary

Introduction

Isoprene dominates global non-methane volatile organic compound emissions, and impacts tropospheric chemistry by influencing oxidants and aerosols. We propose that the elevational gradient in the Amazonian forest isoprene emission capacity is determined by plant species distributions and can substantially explain isoprene emission variability in tropical forests, and use a model to demonstrate the resulting impacts on regional air quality. Recent studies suggest that B1.4% of the B16,000 tree species in the Amazon are hyperdominant and account for half of all the Amazonian trees[9], and only B1% of tree species are responsible for half of all carbon storage and productivity[10] It is still not clear how many plant species can emit substantial quantities of isoprene, how these isoprene emitters are distributed across the Amazon basin, what is the magnitude of the emission, and how it varies seasonally. By updating the isoprene EFs based on the observed magnitude and the relation between isoprene emissions and terrain elevations, there are significant impacts on regional oxidants distributions predicted by a regional model simulations

Methods

Results

Conclusion