Monitoring climatic changes and carbon cycle in canyons and caves: the C6 project.

Abstract

The acronym C6 means "Climatic Changes and Carbon Cycle in Canyons and Caves". It is a monitoring project, for the evaluation of climate change signals, based on measuring sites located inside canyons and caves; it merged in the year 2005, under the scientific supervision of the Palermo Branch of the Italian National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology (I.N.G.V.), two different monitoring programs active since 1999. The choice of these environments is based on their morphological structure: being them more or less segregated respect the outer atmosphere, they act as low-pass filters respect the variations of the monitored parameters, which are rainfall and dropping water amounts and rates, air temperatures and relative humidity and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. On the basis of the preliminary data, reported and discussed in the paper, the C6 network seems to be capable to give useful information on the local effects of global changes, even if at the moment the monitored parameters concern only the abiotic components of the studied ecosystems.