HR: 10:20h
AN: C41D-01 INVITED     [PDF]
TI: The Interaction of Snow Physical Processes With Vegetation in Open and Forested Biomes
AU: * Pomeroy, J W
EM: pomeroy@usask.ca
AF: Department of Geography, University of Saskatchewan, 9 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A5 Canada
AB: It is well accepted that the physical processes which drive snowcover accumulation, redistribution, transformation and ablation are intimately governed by their interaction with the properties of both local and regional vegetation. It is more recently accepted that the type, structure and spatial distribution of vegetation are themselves affected by snow processes such that natural snow-vegetation-climate systems have evolved distinctive characteristics in various cold regions biomes. The human ecology of snow-vegetation systems is less well known, but extremely important as vegetation is managed to promote beneficial snow characteristics for the purposes of agricultural management in many snowy cultivated farming regions of the world. This paper will review recent field observations and descriptions of characteristic snow process-vegetation interactions and phenomena in various circumpolar biomes and the potential transferability of observed processes and snow-vegetation relationships amongst biomes in the circumpolar world. The spatial distributions of processes and states within a biome are shown to have important implications for aggregated descriptions of snow at the biome scale; the stability of these distributions will be emphasised.
DE: 1615 Biogeochemical processes (4805)
DE: 1803 Anthropogenic effects
DE: 1851 Plant ecology
DE: 1863 Snow and ice (1827)
DE: 3322 Land/atmosphere interactions
SC: Cryosphere [C]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting