Article accepted in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology

A research article written by Lixin Wang, Stephen Good, Kelly, and Lucas Cernusak will soon appear in the journal Agricultural and Forest Meteorology.

An article written by Lixin Wang (along with co-authors Stephen Good, Kelly, and Lucas Cernusak) has been accepted for publication in the journal Agricultural and Forest Meteorology. The article, “Direct quantification of leaf transpiration isotopic composition” has been kicking around the review process for a little while and we’re happy to see it is finally heading to press. The article reports on some new methods that Steve and Lixin developed to characterize transpiration and the isotopic composition of leaf water flux using an flow-through chamber design coupled to a integrated cavity output spectrometer from Los Gatos, Inc. This work was conducted both at our field site in Kenya as well as in the lab at Princeton. We’re very grateful that Lucas got involved in the manuscript, and because of him we’re even able to show that our method can achieve rapid measurements of leaf isotopic water flux with minimal impact on plant leaf water enrichment. We’re really excited about this method – not only does it give us a new tool for understanding aspect of plant water use and transpiration water sources at our field site, but it has also opened a door for us to use the same general approach for characterizing other in-situ water vapor fluxes and compositions within the soil-vegetation-atmosphere continuum. We’re already working on expanding the methods… so more to come soon!