This project seeks to quantify and analyze microclimatic variation in plant communities across JRBP ('O'O) by installing microclimate sensors across a diversity of habitats around the preserve for a period of 10 years.

Variation in topography and land-use history has produced a diverse mosaic of vegetation types across the landscape of JRBP ('O'O). Microclimate sensors have been and will continue to be installed across the preserve to detect differences in microclimates across different plant communities that receive similar amounts of solar radiation. Some sensors are co-located with existing Jasper Ridge infrastructure like the weather station, and some are located to identify how management activities like fuel reduction treatments alter microclimate. Others will be sited where cold-air pooling is expected to influence vegetation. Over time, the number of sensor locations is expected to grow, and more sensor types (e.g., monitoring different microclimatic variables as well as processes such as soil respiration) will be installed.

Two principal questions are being addressed:

• Do different vegetation types create distinct local microclimates?
• How do different topographical settings and their influence on plant species affect the degree to which vegetation can "buffer" microclimate? 

A TMS-4 sensor is co-located with an existing Jasper Ridge weather station to identify how microclimatic variables are coordinated with longer-term data collected at JRBP. The larger group of sensors can then be compared to data from the weather station to identify whether there are consistent relationships (e.g., temperature offsets from the weather station's 2m air temperature sensor) based on vegetation type.

The resulting dataset will prove useful for a wide variety of researchers at Jasper Ridge, as well as for researchers around the world studying microclimates, or scaling process rates. Ultimately, the dataset will be useful in tracking how climatic changes and variation are realized at the smallest scales across the landscape, across seasons, and across years.