Two for one: Partitioning CO2 fluxes and understanding the relationship between solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence and gross primary productivity using machine learning

Accurately partitioning net ecosystem exchange (NEE) into ecosystem respiration (ER) and gross primary productivity (GPP) is critical for understanding the terrestrial carbon cycle. The standard partitioning methods rely on simplified empirical models, which have inherent structural errors. These structural errors lead to biased GPP and ER estimation, especially during extreme events (e.g., drought) and human disturbances (e.g., crop harvest). Recently, solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) has been shown to be well correlated to GPP, thus offering a path to improve the NEE partitioning by constraining GPP. However, the ecosystem-scale relationship between GPP and SIF remains limited. Here, we show that neural networks informed by SIF observations (NNSIF) can be successfully used to partition NEE, while simultaneously learning the ecosystem-scale GPP-SIF relationship. NNSIF was compared against standard partitioning methods and NN without SIF constraint (NNnoSIF), using field data from different ecosystems and synthetic data generated by a coupled fluorescence-photosynthesis model (SCOPE). NNSIF showed superior performance as: (1) it effectively improves the ER estimation, especially at high temperature, (2) it better captures the moisture limitation on ER, (3) it more accurately estimates LUE variations to stress, and (4) it uniquely captures the rapid GPP drop after land management (harvest). Furthermore, NNSIF can retrieve the GPP-SIF relationship at the ecosystem scale, and elucidate how this relationship responds to environmental conditions. Overall, our algorithm provides the first direct and non-empirical estimate of the ecosystem-scale GPP-SIF relationship, without relying on any prior empirical assumptions on the relationships between CO2 fluxes, climatic drivers, and SIF. The new knowledge learned by NNSIF can help better estimate global-scale GPP using satellite SIF, especially during extreme events and in the presence of land management.