I am conducting a mesocosm experiment in 68L outdoor totes investigating the potential of gamma irradiation to detoxify oil sands tailings waste. One of the ways I am assessing the effectiveness is by looking at the effect of GI on GPP, R and NEP in the mesocosms. I have about a dozen cases out of 261 where my respiration calculations return positive values. The problem is almost exclusively with the mesocosms constructed out of mine waste (both irradiated and non-irradiated) which seem to remain sub-saturated about 98% of the time. I know that because respiration is the consumption or breakdown of material that it can't be a positive value.
I am wondering then how best to deal with these erroneous values, they range from 0.120852 to 8.192 mg/O2/m3/day ? Should I try smoothing the data, should I set the values to 0, should I remove them from the analysis? Unfortunately, if I remove these values from the analysis, it almost eliminates one of my totes from the analysis.
Are there any ideas of what may have caused these erroneous estimates? I was thinking perhaps if there is residual oil on the surface of the water that it could be affecting gas-transfer rates across the air-water interface?
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