BIFoR-FACE has upgraded the software it uses to distribute carbon dioxide over mature woodland.
The University of Birmingham’s BIFoR FACE facility in Staffordshire has been operating since 2017 as an open-air laboratory set within an old growth deciduous woodland. This experimental site mimics the future atmospheric content of carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 15-year period. This is achieved during the summer growing seasons by sending CO2 into patches of woodland and then using a process-controlled algorithm to carefully distribute the gas into the air. That may sound complicated and hard to do, and that is because it is exactly that.
BIFoR-FACE sits within a mature oak woodland where the trees are between 24-28 meters tall. To achieve the “atmosphere of the future” (30-50 years into the future) a bespoke software package was written back in the 1990s at Brookhaven National Laboratories in New York USA to operate the original forest FACE experiment (Duke FACE) at Duke University, North Carolina, USA. The first round of FACE experiments in North America that followed DUKE FACE were designed to investigate the impacts of elevated CO2 (eCO2) on plantation forests. Consequently, they are referred as the “1st generation” of FACE experiments. The software package was simply called the FACE Control Program (FCP) and has been recycled and reused at multiple FACE experiments ever since, including BIFoR-FACE and EucFACE. These latter two experiments have been built and operated in the last 15 years and target the impacts of eCO2 on semi-natural woodlands, and are referred to as 2nd generation forest-FACE.
The reason for the near constant use of the FCP over this period has been its ability to accurately dose such a large and dynamic space, like a mature woodland, so well (Hart et al., 2019). However, although it is robust, it had become antiquated in comparison to the rapid rise in computer technology. Every time the FCP was required to interface with new instruments or software updates, operational issues would be encountered. This was compounded by the lack of professionals available to support the program as it was written in a computer language known as Turbo Pascal which is rarely used these days. The team at BIFoR FACE saw an opportunity to refresh this software and make it more accessible to the wider scientific community.
Array 4 control station and Dr Kris Hart operating NG-FCP. Credit: Thomas Downes
A commercial partnership with a Midlands-based business provided the financial opportunity to invest in the creation of a completely new FCP. This new FCP would serve the current FACE community and, hopefully, any planned for the future. This vision was also supported by the Amazon-FACE community which provided a pathway to some match-funding. As a result, the University of Birmingham have engaged with a UK based supplier of process control technology to produce the Next-Generation FCP (NG-FCP). After a period of consultation and testing, a successful retrofit has been achieved at BIFoR FACE.
The new software has proven to be simple to use and easy to tweak. Crucially, it matches the dosing capability of the original FCP so well, that the team at BIFoR will operate from the next growing season exclusively using the NG-FCP. The next stage will be to demonstrate its capacity to the Amazon-FACE project partners and hopefully freely incorporate into its operation.
