The time series of Net Ecosystem Exchange (NEE) of carbon by an entire forest ecosystem on time scales from hourly to decadal was measured by eddy-covariance supplemented with plot-level measurements of biomass and tree demography. The results demonstrate the response of forest carbon fluxes and long-term budgets to climatic factors and to successional change. The data from this project have been extensively used worldwide by the carbon cycle science community in support of model development and validation of remote sensing observations.