Distinct communities under the snow: describing characteristics of subnivium arthropod communities.

Arthropods are active during the winter in temperate regions. Many use the seasonal snowpack as a buffer against harsh ambient conditions and are active in a refugium known as the subnivium. While the use of the subnivium by arthropods is well established, far less is known about subnivium community composition, abundance, biomass, and diversity and how these characteristics compare with the community in the summer.

Initial soil conditions outweigh management in a cool-season dairy farm's carbon sequestration potential.

Pastures and rangelands are a dominant portion of global agricultural land and have the potential to sequester carbon (C) in soils, mitigating climate change. Management intensive grazing (MIG), or high density grazing with rotations through paddocks with long rest periods, has been highlighted as a method of enhancing soil C in pastures by increasing forage production. However, few studies have examined the soil C storage potential of pastures under MIG in the northeastern United States, where the dairy industry comprises a large portion of agricultural use and the regional agricultural economy.

Divergent carbon cycle response of forest and grass-dominated northern temperate ecosystems to record winter warming.

Northern temperate ecosystems are experiencing warmer and more variable winters, trends that are expected to continue into the foreseeable future. Despite this, most studies have focused on climate change impacts during the growing season, particularly when comparing responses across different vegetation cover types. Here we examined how a perennial grassland and adjacent mixed forest ecosystem in New Hampshire, United States, responded to a period of highly variable winters from 2014 through 2017 that included the warmest winter on record to date.

Northern forest winters have lost cold, snowy conditions that are important for ecosystems and human communities.

Winter is an understudied but key period for the socioecological systems of northeastern North American forests. A growing awareness of the importance of the winter season to forest ecosystems and surrounding communities has inspired several decades of research, both across the northern forest and at other mid- and high-latitude ecosystems around the globe. Despite these efforts, we lack a synthetic understanding of how winter climate change may impact hydrological and biogeochemical processes and the social and economic activities they support.

A longer vernal window: the role of winter coldness and snowpack in driving spring transitions and lags.

Climate change is altering the timing and duration of the vernal window, a period that marks the end of winter and the start of the growing season when rapid transitions in ecosystem energy, water, nutrient, and carbon dynamics take place. Research on this period typically captures only a portion of the ecosystem in transition and focuses largely on the dates by which the system wakes up. Previous work has not addressed lags between transitions that represent delays in energy, water, nutrient, and carbon flows.

Stoichiometry of soil enzyme activity at global scale.

Extracellular enzymes are the proximate agents of organic matter decomposition and measures of these activities can be used as indicators of microbial nutrient demand. We conducted a global-scale meta-analysis of the seven-most widely measured soil enzyme activities, using data from 40 ecosystems. The activities of beta-1,4-glucosidase, cellobiohydrolase, beta-1,4-N-acetylglucosaminidase and phosphatase g(-1) soil increased with organic matter concentration; leucine aminopeptidase, phenol oxidase and peroxidase activities showed no relationship.