Snowpack affects soil microclimate throughout the year
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Snowpack affects soil microclimate throughout the year Geoffrey Wilson 1 & Mark Green 2,3 & John Brown 4 & John Campbell 3 & Peter Groffman 1,5 & Jorge Durán 6 & Jennifer Morse 7 Received: 17 March 2020 / Accepted: 5 November 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
Variations in snow depth have complex effects on soil microclimate. Snow insulates soil and thus regulates, along with air temperature, the nature, and extent of soil freezing. There is great uncertainty about the main drivers of soil freezing, which have important effects on ecosystem carbon and nitrogen cycling processes and might change as climate warms and snowfall decreases as part of climate change. Here, we utilitze sites from a variety of elevations and aspects within the northern hardwood forest at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest (New Hampshire, USA) to investigate relationships between seasonal snowpack, soil freezing, and soil microclimate across this gradient using 8 years of bi-weekly snowpack and soil frost-depth measurements, and continuous soil climate monitoring. We utilize a time-integrated snowpack descriptor and find that snowpacks with lower seasonal snow water equivalents result in more soil temperature variation and deeper soil frost but have no effect on variation in soil moisture. Seasonal snow water equivalent of the snowpack influences the date of rapid soil warming in the spring, which in turn influences both summer soil moisture and an index of annual cumulative soil heat. These results show that snowpack dynamics, which are highly sensitive to changes in climate, have wide-ranging effects on soil microclimate year-round and thus could have important implications for ecosystem carbon and nitrogen cycling processes. Keywords Snowpack . Soil microclimate . Soil frost . Winter climate change
1 Introduction Soil microclimate is one of the most important controls on terrestrial ecosystem processes. Climate models forecast continued increases in both air temperatures and precipitation in the northeastern USA (Campbell et al. 2010, Hayhoe et al. 2008, Ahmed et al. 2013), and such increases are likely to influence soil microclimate through changes in the soil physical
* Geoffrey Wilson [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Climatic Change
environment and plant-soil interactions (Kardol et al. 2010). However, the scope and magnitude of these changes are difficult to predict and might be associated with a wide suite of changes in ecosystem processes. For example, soil metabolic rates, as indicated by soil respiration, are tightly correlated to soil temperature (e.g., Davidson et al. 1998, Fahey et al. 2005a). Similarly, nitrogen (N) cycling is sensitive to soil temperature, moisture, and their interactions (e.g., Hong et al. 2005, Groffman et al. 2009). Snowpack is a key mediator of how soil microclimate will respond to climate change. A developed snowpack insulates soil and can prevent soils from freezing even when air temperatures are below zero (Brooks et al.
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