Using the neonSoilFlux package

In neonSoilFlux: Compute Soil Carbon Fluxes for the National Ecological Observatory Network Sites

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Introduction

Welcome to the neonSoilFlux package! This vignette will guide you through the process of using this package to acquire and compute soil CO~2~ fluxes at different sites in the National Ecological Observatory Network.

You can think about this package working in two primary phases:

1. acquiring the environment data for a given month at a NEON site (acquire_neon_data). This includes: a. Soil temperature at different depths. b. Soil water content at different depths. c. Soil CO$_{2}$ concentration. d. Atmospheric pressure e. Soil properties (bulk density, others)

2. Given those properties, computing the soil surface fluxes and the associated uncertainty using a variety of methods to compute fluxes (compute_neon_flux).

We split these two functions in order to optimize time and that both were fundamentally different processes. Acquiring the NEON data makes use of the neonUtilities package.

This package takes the guess work out of which data products to collect, hoping to reduce the workflow needed. We rely very much on the tidyverse philosophy for computation and coding here.

An overview of the package is also presented in neonSoilFlux: An R Package for Continuous Sensor-Based Estimation of Soil CO~2~ Fluxes, published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

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Get a NEON API token

NEON is now requiring an API token to access their data. You can find information about acquiring a token at https://www.neonscience.org/resources/learning-hub/tutorials/api-token-setup.

Once you have an NEON API token, you can set it with the function neon_api_token:

neonSoilFlux::neon_api_token("YOUR_TOKEN_HERE", install = TRUE)

Acquiring NEON environmental data

Load up the relevant libraries:

library(tidyverse)
library(neonSoilFlux)
library(neonUtilities)

Let's say we want to acquire the NEON soil data at the SJER site during the month June in 2022:

out_env_data <- acquire_neon_data(site_name = 'SJER',
                  download_date = '2022-06'
                  )

Two required inputs are needed to run the function acquire_neon_data:

• NEON site name (a four digit code standard by NEON)
• Download date, a string in the YYYY-MM format
• Additional optional arguments are also
• Optional arguments are detailed in the section titled "Advanced Options"

As the data are acquired various messages from the loadByProduct function from the neonUtilities package are shown - this is normal. Products are acquired from each spatial location (horizontalPosition) or vertical depth (verticalPosition) at a NEON site.

Outputs for acquire_neon_data are two nested data frames:

• site_data This contains three variables: the measurement name (one of soilCO2concentration, VSWC (soil water content), soilTemp (soil temperature), and staPres (atmospheric pressure)), monthly_mean contains the mean value of the measurement at each horizontal and vertical depth. We compute the monthly mean using a bootstapped technique. data which contains the stacked variables acquired from neonUtilities - the horizontal and vertial positions, timestamp (in UTC), associated values, the QF flag (0 = pass, 1 = fail, LINK)
• site_megapit: the nested data frame of the soil sampling data, found here LINK. This data table is essential what is reported back from acquiring the data product from NEON.

Data preparation

For each data product, the acquire_neon_data function also performs two additional checks:

• The soil water content data product requires some additional calibration to correct both the soil sensor depth and calibration in the function swc_correct. Information about regarding this correction is found here: LINK. Once updated sensors are installed in the future we will depreciate this function.
• The actual measurement depth (in meters) is extracted for each position.
• The monthly mean for each measurement at each depth is computed, described in the section titled "Computing the monthly mean".

Advanced options

The function acquire_neon_data has additional input options that may be useful for your work:

• token: The string of the NEON API token. The default is NULL, but you can supply a API token directly. Acquiring a NEON token is at https://www.neonscience.org/resources/learning-hub/tutorials/api-token-setup.
• time_frequency Will you be using 30 minute ("30_minute") or 1 minute ("1_minute") recorded data? The currently set default is 30 minutes. 1 minute data is implemented, but has not been sufficiently tested (and it also requires a lot of in-computer memory).
• provisional: Should you use provisional data when downloading? This option is useful if you are accessing data that is not part of the most current NEON data release (i.e. the current year). Defaults to FALSE.
• depth_chop: This is useful if you want to only compute fluxes with measurement levels to a certain depth. There are typically 8 measurement levels below ground. Currently set to NULL (all levels). The provided integer must be greater than 4 (top 4 levels).

Visualizing outputs

With the resulting output from acquire_neon_data, you can then unnest the different data frames to make plots. The following code plots the timeseries of volumetric soil water content across all spatial locatios at SJER:

library(tidyverse)

# Extract data
VSWC_data <- out_env_data$site_data |>
  filter(measurement == 'VSWC') |>
  unnest(cols=c("data"))

# Plot data
VSWC_data |>
  ggplot(aes(x=startDateTime,y=VSWCMean)) +
  geom_point(aes(color=as.factor(VSWCFinalQF))) +
  facet_grid(verticalPosition~horizontalPosition)

Computing the monthly mean

The monthly mean is utilized when a given measurement fails final QF checks. This function is provided by code from Zoey Werbin. At each replicate location (horizontalPosition) and soil depth, and a monthly mean is computed when there are at least 15 days of measurements.

Assume you have a vector of measurements $\vec{y}$, standard errors $\vec{\sigma}$, and expanded uncertainty $\vec{\epsilon}$ (all of length $M$) that passes the QF checks in a given month. By definition, the expanded uncertainty $\vec{\epsilon}$ includes a 95% confidence interval, so $\vec{\sigma}{i}\leq\vec{\epsilon}{i}$. Additionally, we define the bias $\vec{b}=\sqrt{\left(\vec{\epsilon}\right)^{2}-\left(\vec{\sigma}\right)^{2}}$ to be the quadrature difference between the expanded uncertainty and the standard error.

We generate a bootstrap sample of the mean $\overline{y}$ and standard error $\overline{s}$ the following ways. For our cases we set the number of bootstrap samples $N$ to be 5000. Individual entries for $\overline{y}{i}$ and $\overline{s}{i}$ are determined by the following:

1. Randomly sample from the uncertainty and bias independently: $\vec{\sigma}{j}$ and the bias $\vec{b}{k}$ (not necessarily the same sample)
2. Generate $N$ random samples from a normal distribution with mean $\vec{y}$ and standard deviation $\vec{\sigma}_{j}$. Since $M<N$, R will recycle the vector $\vec{y}$ so that this sample is of length $M$. We will call the sample of $\vec{y}$ as $\vec{x}$.
3. With these $N$ random samples, $\overline{y}{i}=\overline{\vec{x}}+\vec{b}{k}$ and $s_{i}$ is the sample standard deviation of $\vec{x}$. We expect that $s_{i} \approx \vec{\sigma}_{j}$.

Once that is complete, the reported monthly mean and standard deviation is $\overline{\overline{y}}$ and $\overline{s}$.

Computing soil CO2 fluxes

Once we have out_env_data from acquire_neon_flux, we then compute the fluxes at this site:

out_fluxes <- compute_neon_flux(
  input_site_env = out_env_data$site_data,
  input_site_megapit = out_env_data$site_megapit
  )

The resulting data frame out_fluxes has the following variables:

• startDateTime: Time period of measurement (as POSIXct)
• horizontalPosition: Sensor location where flux is computed
• flux_compute: A nested tibble with soil flux gradients computed via different diffusitivies at different measurement depths. See below.
• surface_diffusivity: Computation of surface diffusivity (see below)
• soilCO2concentrationMeanQF: QF flag for soil CO2 concentration across all vertical depths at the given horizontal position: 0 = no issues, 1 = monthly mean used in measurement, 2 = QF fail
• VSWCMeanQF: QF flag for volumetric soil water content (VSWC) across all vertical depths at the given horizontal position: 0 = no issues, 1 = monthly mean used in measurement, 2 = QF fail
• soilTempMeanQF: QF flag for soil temperature across all vertical depths at the given horizontal position: 0 = no issues, 1 = monthly mean used in measurement, 2 = QF fail
• staPresMeanQF: QF flag for atmospheric pressure at the given horizontal position: 0 = no issues, 1 = monthly mean used in measurement, 2 = QF fail

A QF measurement fails when there is a monthly mean could not be computed for a measurement. If any of the input variables (soil CO2, VSWC, soil temperature, and atmospheric pressure) have a QF fail, then all flux calculations to fail at that given horizontal position.

The nested data frame flux_compute has the following structure:

• diffus_method: The type of diffusivity used to compute fluxes. Currently implemented are "Marshall" or "Millington-Quirk"
• flux: The calculated soil flux ($\mu$mol m^-2^ s^−1^)
• flux_err: The calculated flux error (by quadrature)
• gradient: The computed CO~2~ flux gradient ($\mu$mol m^-3^ m^{−1}^)
• gradient_error: The computed CO~2~ flux gradient error (by quadrature)
• method: Each site had three measurement layers, so we denote the flux as a three-digit subscript $F_{ijk}$ with indicator variables $i$, $j$, and $k$ indicate if a given layer was used (written in order of increasing depth), according to the following:

| - F~000~ ("000") is a surface flux estimate using the intercept of the linear regression of $D_{a}$ with depth and the slope from the linear regression of CO~2~ with depth (which represents $\displaystyle \frac{dC}{dz}$ in Fick's Law).. | - F~110~ ("110") is a flux estimate across the two shallowest measurement layers. | - F~011~ ("011") is a flux estimate across the two deepest measurement layers. | - F~101~ ("101") is a flux estimate across the shallowest and deepest measurement layers.

| For F~110~, F~011~, and F~101~, the diffusivity used in Fick's Law is always at the deeper measurement layer. When used as a surface flux estimate we assume CO~2~ remains constant above this flux depth.

• r2: The R^2^ value from the linear regression for F~000~. Otherwise it is NA.

The nested data frame surface_diffusivity has the following structure:

• zOffset: The depth that diffusivity is computed at.
• diffusivity: The calculated soil flux ($\mu$mol m^-2^ s^{−1}^)
• diffusExpUncert: The calculated diffusivity uncertainty (by quadrature)
• diffus_method: The type of diffusivity used to compute fluxes. Currently implemented are "Marshall" or "Millington-Quirk"

Assessing Environmental QF flags

You can see the distribution the QF flags for each environmental measurement with env_fingerprint_plot:

env_fingerprint_plot(out_fluxes)

The resulting plot has rows corresponding to the replicate plots (horizontalPosition), and columns corresponding to the different environmental measurements used when computing fluxes.

Explanation of QF check values:

• "Pass" means that for the given timepoint, the monthly mean was not used or the sensor was not offline. This is the highest quality measurement.
• "Monthly Mean" means that for the given timepoint the measurement value was replaced by the monthly mean.
• "Fail" means that no measurement was available. This occurs if there is not sufficient data to compute the monthly mean. When a measurement fails it usually will be for the entire month.

Assessing flux QF flags

Similarly, you can see the distribution of QF flags for each diffusivity and flux computation with flux_fingerprint_plot. Because there are two different diffusivities implemented ("Marshall" or "Millington-Quirk"), that option needs to be passed to flux_fingerprint_plot:

# Fingerprint plot for Marshall method:
flux_fingerprint_plot(
  input_fluxes = out_fluxes,
  input_diffus_method = "Marshall")

# Fingerprint plot for Marshall method:
flux_fingerprint_plot(
  input_fluxes = out_fluxes,
  input_diffus_method = "Millington-Quirk")

(The default method is "Marshall"). The resulting plot has rows corresponding to the replicate plots (horizontalPosition), and columns corresponding to the vertical levels using when computing the gradient for the soil flux.

Explanation of QF check values:

• "Pass" means that for the given timepoint, the computed flux measurement was not NA or positive (the sign of the derived flux conformed to expectations). Monthly means could be used in the computation.
• "Fail" means that the flux was not computed. This occurs if there is not sufficient data to compute the monthly mean (one environmental measurement was "Fail"), or the computed flux was negative.

Visualizing outputs

To plot the flux results:

out_fluxes |>
  select(-surface_diffusivity) |>
  unnest(cols=c(flux_compute)) |>
  ggplot(aes(x=startDateTime,y=flux,color=method)) +
    geom_line() +
    facet_wrap(~horizontalPosition,scales = "free_y")

The diffusivity can be plotted similarly:

out_fluxes |>
  select(-flux_compute) |>
  unnest(cols=c(surface_diffusivity)) |>
  ggplot(aes(x=startDateTime,y=diffusivity,color=as.factor(zOffset))) +
  geom_line() +
  facet_wrap(~horizontalPosition,scales = "free_y")  

neonSoilFlux documentation built on July 3, 2026, 5:07 p.m.