Abstract

Latin America is one of the areas described as lacking flux sites to represent its ecosystem-level fluxes of water, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Chile is a natural laboratory that allows the study of natural phenomena in a wide range of latitudinal and altitudinal variations, while at the same time is home to hotspots of biodiversity in the central part of the country (particularly, vascular plants) and at the southern end in Patagonia (particularly, non-vascular plants). ChileFlux is a recently formed network of 6 sites in natural ecosystems (forests, peatlands and shrublands) and 12 sites in agricultural ecosystems (fruit orchards and vineyards). Some of the findings so far show that the characteristics of similar ecosystems in the Northern Hemisphere cannot be assumed to be the same for the Southern Hemisphere ecosystems. The establishment of these sites started in 2011, today range from 30° to 55° latitude and are generating data to feed regional and global models for predicting the effects of climate change.