The Roads Traveled to Reach a Greenhouse Gas Flux Network

Abstract Flux measurements of greenhouse gases provide information on the metabolic activity of ecosystems. And they are useful for parameterizing and validating remote sensing and biogeochemical models that are used to assess water and carbon fluxes across space and time. I discuss the road trip by which we, a community of greenhouse gas flux data producers and consumers, have traveled over the last four decades. A subset of us started working on this topic in the 1980s as independent researchers. Then, we adopted the nascent eddy covariance method to measure greenhouse gas fluxes directly over managed and natural ecosystems. During this journey, our ability and capacity to measure greenhouse gas fluxes co‐evolved with the microprocessor revolution that produced our sensors, computers, and data storage systems. As time passed, we built the software and social and intellectual capital needed to conduct this work more extensively, which formed networks of observation sites. This capital was required to fund salaries for those doing the field work, to construct towers and to purchase sensors. Separate infusions of capital were needed to operate a data system that shared, vetted and distributed flux and meteorological data and site metadata. Accomplishments include producing over 4,000 site‐years of greenhouse gas flux data from hundreds of sites spanning the globe. Now, we are using these data to do next generation science on the broad topic of biosphere‐atmosphere interactions, like building high‐resolution, data‐informed global flux maps and studying trends on gas fluxes in a warming world with more CO 2 .