Carbon dioxide is the major “greenhouse” gas responsible for global warming. Southeastern pine forests appear to be among the largest terrestrial sinks of carbon dioxide in the US. This collaborative study specifically addressed the isotopic signatures of the large fluxes of carbon taken up by photosynthesis and given off by respiration in this ecosystem. By measuring these isotopic signatures at the ecosystem level, we have provided data that will help to more accurately quantify the magnitude of carbon fluxes on the regional scale and how these fluxes vary in response to climatic parameters such as rainfall and air temperature. The focus of the MBL subcontract was to evaluate how processes operating at the physiological and ecosystem scales affects the resultant isotopic signature of plant waxes that are emitted as aerosols into the convective boundary layer. These wax aerosols provide a large-spatial scale integrative signal of isotopic discrimination of atmospheric carbon dioxide by terrestrial photosynthesis (Conte and Weber 2002). The ecosystem studies have greatly expanded of knowledge of wax biosynthetic controls on their isootpic signature The wax aerosol data products produced under this grant are directly applicable as input for global carbon modeling studies that use variations in the concentration and …