Integrating snow science and wildlife ecology in Arctic-boreal North America

Abstract

Snow covers Arctic and boreal regions (ABRs) for approximately 9months of the year, thus snowscapes dominate the form and function of tundra and boreal ecosystems. In recent decades, Arctic warming has changed the snowcover’s spatial extent and distribution, as well as its seasonal timing and duration, while also altering the physical characteristics of the snowpack. Understanding the little studied effects of changing snowscapes on its wildlife communities is critical. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the urgent need for, and suggest an approach for developing, an improved suite of temporally evolving, spatially distributed snowproducts to help understand howdynamics in snowscape properties impact wildlife, with a specific focus onAlaska and northwesternCanada. Via consideration of existing knowledge of wildlife-snow interactions, currently available snowproducts for focus region, and results of three case studies, we conclude that improving snow science in the ABR will be best achieved by focusing efforts on developing data-model fusion approaches to produce fitfor-purpose snowproducts that include, but are not limited to, wildlife ecology. The relativewealth of coordinated in situmeasurements, airborne and satellite remote sensing data, andmodeling tools being collected and developed as part ofNASA’s Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment and SnowEx campaigns, for example, provide a data rich environment for developing and testing new remote sensing algorithms and retrievals of snowscape properties.