Tonzi Ranch

The Tonzi Ranch is an oak savanna woodland, near Ione, CA. This site was one of the first AmeriFlux sites that the Biomet lab established, 2001, when coming to Berkeley in 1999. 

https://ameriflux.lbl.gov/sites/siteinfo/US-Ton

The trees are about 8 m tall and the leaf area index is under 2 m2 m-2.  The ecosystem experiences a Mediterranean type climate with cool wet winters and hot dry, rainless summers.  Temperatures range between 0 and 40 C. Annual rainfall is on the order of 550 mm/y with 30% variability.

The site has been subject to a number of studies on the role of soil water deficits on carbon and water fluxes,

Baldocchi, D., et al. (2021). "On the inter- and intra-annual variability of ecosystem evapotranspiration and water use efficiency of an oak savanna and annual grassland subjected to booms and busts in rainfall." Global Change Biology 27(2): 359–375. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15414

Ma, S., et al. (2016). "Slow ecosystem responses conditionally regulate annual carbon balance over 15 years in Californian oak-grass savanna." Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 228–229: 252–264. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2016.07.016