In this activity, we aim to identify and quantify methane emission hot-spots associated with infrastructure at landfills and quantify emission levels from cover soils. We will survey ten Ontario landfills as study sites, five active sites and five closed or capped sites, each over the course of one year. Our measurements will include methane flux, total soil methane concentration, and methane isotopes. This data will be used to support the model development in Activity 5 and feed into the site selection for hyperspectral imaging in Activity 3.
We anticipate that establishing isotopic signatures will lead to a preliminary identification of areas experiencing higher proportions of microbial methanotrophy, which we will then use to couple with microbial community data in Activity 2 leading to later enrichment experiments in Activity 6.