Abstract
Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are emitted from many sources and have important implications for plant fitness, ecological interactions, and atmospheric processes, including photochemistry and ozone formation. Forest ecosystems are strong sources of biogenic VOCs. We aimed to characterize forest below-canopy VOC mixing ratios, monitored by Proton Transfer Reaction Mass Spectrometry (PTR-MS), at Montseny Natural Park, a Mediterranean forest 50 km from the Barcelona urban area. Measurements were taken every 2 min during six months around the maximum emission period of summer. All VOCs had diel cycles with higher mixing ratios during the day, but different patterns over time. Monitored VOCs were grouped as biogenic, oxygenated, or aromatic compounds. Additionally, a positive matrix factorization analysis identified four emission profiles that were attributed to photochemical VOC production, biogenic emissions, mixed VOC emission sources, and traffic emissions. Even though the biogenic source was the strongest source profile at the site, we found a strong influence of anthropogenic air masses infiltrating the forest canopy and altering the biogenic air masses at the site.
Highlights
Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are emitted from many sources and have important implications for plant fitness, ecological interactions, and atmospheric processes, including photochemistry and ozone formation
We grouped the seasonal dynamics of the monitored VOCs based on the results of a dendrogram and heatmap (Fig. 3)
We report a six month time series of VOC mixing ratios for Montseny Natural Park, a Mediterranean forest in the Iberian Peninsula
Summary
Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are emitted from many sources and have important implications for plant fitness, ecological interactions, and atmospheric processes, including photochemistry and ozone formation. Biogenic sources emit larger quantities of volatile organic com pounds (VOCs) than anthropogenic sources worldwide (Kelly et al, 2018) Atmospheric interactions amongst these two groups, are key to understanding atmospheric chemistry at a regional level. Mediterranean forest ecosystems have high BVOC emissions with an important ecological role, and together with high solar radiation and the influence of anthropogenic sources enhance photochemistry favoring the production of ozone and aerosols. This location was chosen because it has footprints from important local biogenic emissions and distant anthropogenic emissions (Seco et al, 2011b; Seco et al, 2013)
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