Abstract
Global climate warming disproportionately affects high-latitude and mountainous terrestrial ecosystems. Warming is accompanied by permafrost thaw, shorter winters, earlier snowmelt, more intense soil freeze-thaw cycles, drier summers, and longer fire seasons. These environmental changes in turn impact surface water and groundwater flow regimes, water quality, greenhouse gas emissions, soil stability, vegetation cover, and soil (micro)biological communities. Warming also facilitates agricultural expansion, urban growth, and natural resource development, adding growing anthropogenic pressures to cold regions’ landscapes, soil health, and biodiversity. Further advances in the predictive understanding of how cold regions’ critical zone processes, functions, and ecosystem services will continue to respond to climate warming and land use changes require multiscale monitoring technologies coupled with integrated observational and modeling tools. We highlight some of the major challenges, knowledge gaps, and opportunities in cold region critical zone research, with an emphasis on subsurface processes and responses in both natural and agricultural ecosystems.
Highlights
Moderate- to high-latitude terrestrial ecosystems and mountainous regions are rapidly changing because of climate change
These hydrological changes are accompanied by changes in, among others, vegetation cover, thermal regime of soils, fluxes and timing of nutrient export to aquatic ecosystems, emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), and the mobilization of organic carbon and geogenic contaminants [7,8,9,10]
dissolved organic carbon (DOC) leached during soil organic matter (SOM) degradation may form aqueous complexes with trace metals, whereas microbial respiration may lead to the development of anoxic conditions that favor the mobilization of iron(III) oxide–bound arsenic [71]
Summary
Moderate- to high-latitude terrestrial ecosystems and mountainous regions are rapidly changing because of climate change. Retreating snowpacks and earlier snowmelt in mountainous watersheds are decreasing mean annual streamflow and causing peak runoff earlier in the year, while permafrost thaw and seasonal freeze-thaw are modifying the relative importance of surface and groundwater flows in northern ecosystems [4,5,6]. These hydrological changes are accompanied by changes in, among others, vegetation cover, thermal regime of soils, fluxes and timing of nutrient export to aquatic ecosystems, emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), and the mobilization of organic carbon and geogenic contaminants [7,8,9,10]. Talik: the year-round unfrozen zone within a permafrost area that is either closed (isolated) or open (interconnected)
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