Partitioning of net CO₂ exchanges at the city-atmosphere interface into biotic and abiotic components

Eddy covariance (EC) method has been used to measure CO₂ fluxes over various ecosystems. Recently, the EC method has been also deployed in urban areas to measure CO₂ fluxes. Urban carbon cycle is complex because of the additional anthropogenic processes unlike natural ecosystems but the EC method only measures the net sum of all CO₂ sources and sink. This limitation of the EC method hinders us from the underlying processes of the carbon cycle, and it is necessary to partition the net CO₂ fluxes into individual contributions for a better understanding of the urban carbon cycle. Here we propose a statistical method to partition CO₂ fluxes into individual components by extending the method of Menzer and McFadden (2017).•Statistical method is proposed to partition CO₂ fluxes into gross primary production, ecosystem respiration, anthropogenic emissions from a vehicle and building.•This method uses eddy fluxes and footprint-weighted high-resolution land cover data with temporal subsets that a few components can be negligible.•New partitioning method produces reliable individual components of the urban carbon cycle when compared to inventory data and typical biotic responses to environmental conditions.