Interdisciplinary Geo‐ecological Research across Time Scales in the Northeast German Lowland Observatory (TERENO‐NE)

Abstract

The Northeast German Lowland Observatory (TERENO-NE) was established to investigate the regional impact of climate and land use change. TERENO-NE focuses on the Northeast German lowlands, for which a high vulnerability has been determined due to increasing temperatures and decreasing amounts of precipitation projected for the coming decades. To facilitate in-depth evaluations of the effects of climate and land use changes and to separate the effects of natural and anthropogenic drivers in the region, six sites were chosen for comprehensive monitoring. In addition, at selected sites, geoarchives were used to substantially extend the instrumental records back in time. It is this combination of diverse disciplines working across different time scales that makes the observatory TERENO-NE a unique observation platform. We provide information about the general characteristics of the observatory and its six monitoring sites and present examples of interdisciplinary research activities at some of these sites. We also illustrate how monitoring improves process understanding, how remote sensing techniques are fine-tuned by the most comprehensive ground-truthing site DEMMIN, how soil erosion dynamics have evolved, how greenhouse gas monitoring of rewetted peatlands can reveal unexpected mechanisms, and how proxy data provides a long-term perspective of current ongoing changes.

Soil Organic Carbon Mapping Using LUCAS Topsoil Database and Sentinel-2 Data: An Approach to Reduce Soil Moisture and Crop Residue Effects

“…Stagnosols, Luvisols, and their transitional types evolved from unconsolidated glacial till and colluvial soils from eroded loamy material or deposits covering former bogs [17]. The hummocky region shows a complex variability at a short distance of eroded summits to colluvial foot slopes [18]. The truncated soil profiles are mainly classified as Luvisols and Calcaric Regosols, while the colluvial soils are Gleyic-Colluvic Regosols and Terric Histosols.…”

Studying boundary layer methane isotopy and vertical mixing processes at a rewetted peatland site using an unmanned aircraft system

“…The total rewetted area is 421 ha in size (Gelbrecht et al, 2008). The site is a Fluxnet site (DE-Zrk) and is part of the Northeast German Lowland Observatory of the Terrestrial Environmental Observatories Network, TERENO (Heinrich et al, 2018). It is equipped with state-of-the-art eddy covariance (EC) instrumentation recording the wind vector; temperature; and the concentration of water vapour, CH 4 and CO 2 at a frequency of 20 Hz.…”

Tiefer See – a key site for lake sediment research in NE Germany

“…The presentday lake water is mesotrophic and the circulation mode is Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the Deutsche Quartärvereinigung (DEUQUA) e.V. either mono-or dimictic, depending on the formation of a winter ice cover (Kienel et al, 2013). The climate is warmtemperate at the transition from oceanic to continental conditions.…”

“…A comprehensive lake monitoring instrumentation (Fig. 5) has been installed on Tiefer See since 2012 in order to decipher the response of the lake to ongoing climate change (Heinrich et al, 2018) and to study in detail the processes that transform weather signal into the sediment record. The instrumentation includes a permanent weather station on the lake measuring temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation, rainfall and wind speed in 10 min intervals.…”

“…All authors contributed to the discussion and interpreta-tion of the presented research results. Additional information and supplementary data about this project are published (Czymzik et al, 2015(Czymzik et al, , 2018Dräger et al, 2017Dräger et al, , 2019Heinrich et al, 2018Heinrich et al, , 2019Kienel et al, 2013Kienel et al, , 2017Theuerkauf et al, 2015, Theuerkauf andCouwenberg, 2018;Wulf et al, 2016).…”