URBANA, Ill. -- As most of us learned in school, plants use sunlight to synthesize carbon dioxide (CO₂) and water into carbohydrates in a process called photosynthesis. But nature’s “factories” don’t just provide us with food — they also generate insights into how ecosystems will react to a changing climate and carbon-filled atmosphere.

Because of their ability to make valuable products from organic compounds like CO₂, plants are known as “primary producers.” Gross primary production (GPP), which quantifies the rate of CO₂ fixation in plants through photosynthesis, is a key metric to track the health and performance of any plant-based ecosystem.

A research team with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign developed a product to accurately measure GPP: the SatelLite Only Photosynthesis Estimation Gross Primary Production (SLOPE GPP) product at a daily time step and field-scale spatial resolution.

Read more about natural resources and environmental sciences researcher Kaiyu Guan's latest discovery at the CABBI website.