Experiments
- Site
- Storbäcken, north block
- Years
- 2021 - present
- Funder
- Nordic Research Council
- Role
- Principal investigator
3 frames on this sheet
Most warming experiments heat the air, which is expensive, needs power, and changes the summer as well as the winter. A snow fence does something more useful and almost free: it drifts a deeper snowpack behind it, which insulates the soil, keeps it above freezing all winter, and leaves the growing season alone.
Twelve fences went up in 2021, each with a paired control plot beyond the drift. Soil temperature is logged at four depths; carbon, nitrogen and the microbial community are sampled each spring and autumn.
The winters that the array simulates are the ones this region is forecast to have by 2060. Four years of data is not enough to say anything final, which is the honest thing to put on a project page and the reason the array is built to run for twenty.
