China Ecosystem Spectral Observation Network in Place

From late April to early May, a research team led by Prof. LIU Liangyun at the Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) organized a compaign of construction and annual maintenance of six sites under the China Ecosystem Spectral Observation Network (ChinaSpec for short).

Based on the existing ground CO² flux sites, ChinaSpec aims to provide long-term automatic spectral observations for different ecosystems and basic datasets for research on the mechanism behind vegetation ecology and its application in remote sensing for vegetation.

Prof. LIU, also an initiator of ChinaSpec, is responsible for six observation sites located in suburban of Beijing, Hebei, Gansu, Qinghai, and Jiangxi. The sites represent different climatic regions and cover various ecosystems ranging from farmland, grassland, woodland to wetland.

In order to obtain the vegetation data in spring, a season crucial for vegetable growth, and to ensure the continuity of observation data, the research team overcame the difficulties brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, and successfully completed instrument calibration, installation, and testing of vegetation parameters.

The study is financially supported by the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars "Quantitative Remote Sensing of Vegetation", the National Key Research and Development Program of China " Stereo Observation and Inversion of the Key Parameters of Global Carbon Cycle ", and the Key Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences "TanSat Satellite Scientific Products and Global Carbon Budget Estimate".　

Diagram map of ChinaSpec sites, among which the red labels represent sites constructed by AIR.

The six sites constructed by AIR.

An engineer is working on instrument calibration.

A view of instrument installation.