Ways to Measure Greenhouse Gas Flux in Wetlands

Measuring greenhouse gas fluxes from a variety of conditions and pathways requires a lot of creative solutions. This image from Figure 20 in Practical Guide to Measuring Wetland Carbon Pools and Fluxes shows some different ways measurements are gathered. 

(a) A floating gas flux chamber made of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) connected with inlet and outlet tubes to a high frequency gas analyzer; (b) clear, static chamber over vegetation at the edge of an experimental wetland (at Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center, North Dakota, USA): red arrow pointing to ice pack to keep chamber cool and yellow arrow pointing to fan to mix air; (c) non-growing season chamber measurement in permafrost regions of China; (d) whole-plant chamber over Phragmites for emergent macrophyte and soil fluxes; (e) gas flux measurements of tree stems using the Small Nimble In Situ Fine-Scale Flux (SNIFF) method with cavity ring-down spectroscopy (Picarro, GasScouter) gas analyzer from six stem heights within subtropical Casuarina sp. lowland forest; (f) measurements of methane transport and carbon dioxide respiration from the stems of mangrove Kandelia; (g) leaf chamber equipped with a digital thermometer over Typha; (h) deploying inverted cone ebullition trap (2.5-cm diameter PVC) with plastic funnel (20-cm diameter) attached to air-tight collection bottle on top with valve; (i) submerged peatland ebullition trap using a syringe at Fletcher Creek Ecological Preserve, Ontario, Canada. Images with permission from Olivia Johnson (a, b, h), Xiaoxin Sun (c), Scott Jones (d), Luke Jeffery (e), Jiafang Huang (f), and Maria Strack (i)

Figure 20 in Bansal, S., Creed, I.F., Tangen, B.A. et al. Practical Guide to Measuring Wetland Carbon Pools and Fluxes. Wetlands 43, 105 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-023-01722-2. Open access under creative commons license.