The use of mass balances to test and improve the estimates of carbon fluxes in an ecosystem (Q1091311)

A method is presented to analyse the estimates of carbon fluxes in an ecosystem by demanding that (1) the carbon budget of each ecological group should be balanced and that (2) every carbon flux in these balanced budgets should fall within the range of experimentally obtained values. It is shown that the problem of finding an optimal balanced solution is equivalent to the solution of an overdetermined linear system in the Chebyshev norm. A second problem is to find the minimum and maximum of every flux that may still yield balanced budgets, under the condition that the remaining fluxes are within their estimated ranges. Both problems may be solved by linear programming. The method is illustrated with a small prototype model.