Chimner Donates Equipment to Project in Peru
A Michigan Tech researcher has donated equipment originally used to measure gasses in the Upper Peninsula to a project in the Peruvian Amazon. In 2007, Rod Chimner (CFRES) was the principal investigator on two projects that received funding from the Department of Energy's National Institute for Climate Change Research (DOE-NICCR) to study the effects of climate change in the U.P.
Chimner used a portion of the funding, which totaled in excess of $500,000, to purchase an eddy flux system to measure carbon dioxide and methane levels in peatlands in the U.P. Eddy flux, also known as eddy covariance, is an atmospheric measurement technique which measures fluxes within atmospheric boundary layers.
Once the three-year project ended, Chimner moved on to other research projects.
In 2013 he began a collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service on the Sustainable Wetlands Adaptation and Mitigation Program (SWAMP). "Our work is in tropical South America quantifying carbon stocks and fluxes in the wetlands of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru," Chimner said, noting his involvement with SWAMP has produced several agreements with Michigan Tech over the years.
In 2015, working with the Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonia Peruana (IIAP), Chimner's team conducted gas flux measurements in the Peruvian Amazon. After a year of using hand-held equipment to measure carbon dioxide and methane, Chimner had a revelation. "It occurred to me that I had eddy flux equipment sitting in my lab we could use."
However, using his old equipment involved more than taking it out of mothballs. "So after two years of planning and with funding from SWAMP, we built a 42 m (138 ft.) tower in a peatland in the equatorial Peruvian Amazon and installed my eddy flux equipment on it."
Chimner said the setup, which is the first eddy flux tower in a peatland in the Amazon, is in a naturally protected forest reserve southwest of Iquitos, Peru, and is now an official scientific research area for IIAP.
He said now that the collaboration is running smoothly he would like to donate the equipment to IIAP. "This has many advantages for IIAP and for me. For instance, the equipment requires a lot of maintenance and repairs due to the harsh jungle climate. Because of Peruvian customs issues, it is difficult to send the equipment back and forth to the US for repair and maintenance." However, if the equipment is Peruvian, there are no customs issues and it is easier for IIAP to maintain and upkeep the equipment if they own it, compared to fixing someone else's equipment.
Chimner said the most important issue is what the equipment does, not who owns it. "The real benefit of the equipment is collecting data and building the collaborative research network that I am already a part of. So by donating the equipment if will build even more goodwill and facilitate more research and proposal opportunities."