Abstract
Plant photosynthesis is critical for understanding carbon cycling at landscape and global scales. While tower-based measurements of CO2 have enhanced our knowledge of ecosystem fluxes, scaling these measurements globally is difficult. Satellite observations provide full, global coverage and hold the potential of spatially continuous measurements of ecosystem fluxes, but the requirements for modeling these fluxes from satellite-derived surface parameters are not well understood. This article describes the further development of a tower-mounted, automated, multiangular spectroradiometer system (AMSPEC II) used to study the relationships between canopy-reflectance and plant-physiological processes from multiangular observations, thereby facilitating a comprehensive modeling of the bidirectional reflectance distribution of the canopy. A Webcam permits simultaneous monitoring of phenological changes over time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Amspec II has been designed and developed in collaboration with the Biometeorology Group of the faculty of Land and Food Systems. The authors are particularly grateful to Andrew Hum and Rick Ketler for their support in implementing and designing the system. This project has been funded by an NSERC Discovery and NSERC Accelerator grant to Coops. The authors also acknowledge support of the Canadian Caron Program (CCP).