In an ambitious attempt to plug one of the largest data gaps in global climate science, a highly specialized mobile research lab from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science has begun a multi-year journey across East and Southern Africa to track how the continent’s vast living ecosystems interact with the atmosphere.

The lab, built onto a large truck, represents a rare — and possibly unique — asset in climate research. While permanent environmental monitoring stations exist worldwide, Weizmann researchers believe this is the world’s only fully mobile unit measuring ecosystem “fluxes” — the continuous movement of carbon dioxide, water vapor, energy, and more between vegetation and the atmosphere.

By filling the data gap, scientists hope to understand how land-use changes, such as deforestation to make way for grazing lands, impact water availability, carbon storage and other environmental facets. This will not only help local leaders make data-driven policy decisions, but also contribute to refining climate models on a global scale.

The project is a collaboration between Rehovot-based Weizmann and Fluxnet, a global network of scientists operating fixed towers that rise above vegetation to collect data on the fluxes. Though the group has roughly 600 measurement sites worldwide, there are almost none in East Africa.

The team has operated a fixed flux tower in Israel’s Yatir forest on the northern edge of the Negev Desert for 26 years. The tower is one of the oldest in the global network and the only one situated in a semi-arid forest, but scientists sought to get data from other sites as well, and so........

© The Times of Israel