A dataset of the observations of carbon, water and heat fluxes over an alpine shrubland in Haibei (2011–2020)

Abstract

Alpine shrubland is one of the important vegetation types on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, which mainly lies in the shady or semi-shady slope of snowpack mountains or the high-altitude alluvium and diluvium on plains. It plays a crucial role in carbon sequestration, water conservation and climate regulation. Since 2002, Haibei National Field Research Station for Alpine Grassland (Haibei Station) has been using eddy covariance techniques to continuously observe the carbon, water and heat exchange between an alpine Potentilla fruticosa shrubland ecosystem and the atmosphere and has accumulated nearly 20-year data. On the basis of the previous publication of relevant data from 2003 to 2010, the carbon, we further released water and heat fluxes of the alpine shrubland and supplementary meteorological data from 2011 to 2020. This dataset consists of the subsets of meteorological factors, covering air temperature, air relative humidity, water vapor pressure, wind speed, wind direction, ambient pressure, total solar radiation, net radiation, photosynthetically active radiation, precipitation, soil temperature, and soil moisture, as well as net ecosystem CO2 exchange, ecosystem respiration, gross ecosystem CO2 exchange, latent heat flux, and sensible heat flux. The temporal resolutions of the dataset include half-hourly, daily, monthly, and yearly scales. This dataset can not only be used to scientifically evaluate the environmental drivers and evolution trends of the ecological functions of carbon, water and heat in alpine shrub ecosystems, but also provide ground data support for parameter validation and optimization of remote sensing-based ecological process models.