The terrestrial component of the global carbon cycle has become the focus of intense attention by the scientific community, international environmental organisations, national governments, and increasingly more also by the private sector. A common factor among this multitude of interests is the need for a 'system' capable of quantifying the net exchanges of carbon between the atmosphere and the terrestrial ecosystems. In this paper, we describe a recent initiative by the Integrated Global Observing Strategy Partnership (IGOS-P) aimed at establishing a systematic, long-term observing capability for estimating the spatial and temporal distribution of CO_2 fluxes between the terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere.
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