The Integrated Land Ecosystem-Atmosphere Processes Study (iLEAPS) aims to enhance the understanding of how interacting biological, chemical, and physical processes transport energy and matter through the land-atmosphere interface at all scales.
From past to future and local to global, ILEAPS places a particular emphasis on the human influence on these processes. The land-atmosphere interface is where humans primarily operate, modifying the land surface in ways that influence the fluxes of energy and trace gases between land and atmosphere.
Human-produced emissions change the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Anthropogenic aerosols change the radiative balance of the globe directly by scattering sunlight back to space and indirectly by changing the properties of clouds.
Feedback loops among all these processes, land, the atmosphere, and biogeochemical cycles of nutrients and trace gases extend the human influence even further. iLEAPS focuses on the basic biogeochemical processes that link land-atmosphere exchange, climate, hydrospheric, and tropospheric chemistry.
iLEAPS was established under the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and is now a Global Research Project of Future Earth.
