Abstract
This paper describes a record of air and soil temperature collected from 2001 to 2016 in temperate forests at the Bear Brook Watershed in Maine (BBWM). BBWM is a long-term research site established to study the response of forest ecosystem function to various environmental disturbances, including chronic acidic deposition. Replicate HOBO data loggers were deployed in BBWM’s two forest types (coniferous and deciduous), to record temperatures at four positions: (1) air temperature, 100 cm above the forest floor; (2) surface organic soil, 2 cm below the forest floor surface; (3) mineral soil, 10 cm below the organic–mineral horizon interface; and (4) mineral soil, 25 cm below the organic–mineral horizon interface. Data were recorded every three hours, and these raw data were used to compute daily maximum, daily minimum, daily average, and monthly average values. This fifteen–year record represents one of the few readily–available soil temperature datasets in the region, and provides information on long-term changes in climatology, and seasonal and episodic weather patterns.
Highlights
Background & SummarySoil temperature is an important driver of terrestrial biogeochemical processes
Phenological changes occurring during seasonal transitions are often strongly influenced by changing soil temperatures[12,13,14]
While air and soil temperatures are often well correlated, soil temperature is influenced by environmental variables such as forest composition and canopy cover[20,21], snow cover[22,23,24], and soil moisture[15,25], which may not be adequately parameterized into the models to provide suitable pedotransfer functions
Summary
Soil temperature is an important driver of terrestrial biogeochemical processes. Soil temperature influences microbial and plant activity[1,2,3,4], and plays a critical role in the cycling of nutrients like carbon and nitrogen[5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. Access to long-term datasets of empirical soil temperature measurements is valuable when studying ecosystem processes over short and long time intervals, made even more important in a time of accelerating changes in the climate including warming temperatures, the intensification of the hydrologic cycle, and increased inter- and intra-annual variability in weather[26,27,28]. The objective of this paper is to provide a 15-year dataset of soil temperature from the Bear Brook Watershed in Maine (BBWM). BBWM is a long-term whole-watershed acidification experiment in eastern Maine, USA (44°52'N, 68°06'W), established to study the effects of elevated nitrogen and sulfur deposition on ecosystem processes (Fig. 1).
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