Kropp Heather

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Kropp
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Heather
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  • Article
    Shallow soils are warmer under trees and tall shrubs across arctic and boreal ecosystems
    (IOP Publishing, 2020-12-18) Kropp, Heather ; Loranty, Michael M. ; Natali, Susan M. ; Kholodov, Alexander L. ; Rocha, Adrian V. ; Myers-Smith, Isla H. ; Abbott, Benjamin W. ; Abermann, Jakob ; Blanc-Betes, Elena ; Blok, Daan ; Blume-Werry, Gesche ; Boike, Julia ; Breen, Amy L. ; Cahoon, Sean M. P. ; Christiansen, Casper T. ; Douglas, Thomas A. ; Epstein, Howard E. ; Frost, Gerald V. ; Goeckede, Mathias ; Høye, Toke T. ; Mamet, Steven D. ; O’Donnell, Jonathan A. ; Olefeldt, David ; Phoenix, Gareth K. ; Salmon, Verity G. ; Sannel, A. Britta K. ; Smith, Sharon L. ; Sonnentag, Oliver ; Smith Vaughn, Lydia ; Williams, Mathew ; Elberling, Bo ; Gough, Laura ; Hjort, Jan ; Lafleur, Peter M. ; Euskirchen, Eugenie ; Heijmans, Monique M. P. D. ; Humphreys, Elyn ; Iwata, Hiroki ; Jones, Benjamin M. ; Jorgenson, M. Torre ; Grünberg, Inge ; Kim, Yongwon ; Laundre, James A. ; Mauritz, Marguerite ; Michelsen, Anders ; Schaepman-Strub, Gabriela ; Tape, Ken D. ; Ueyama, Masahito ; Lee, Bang-Yong ; Langley, Kirsty ; Lund, Magnus
    Soils are warming as air temperatures rise across the Arctic and Boreal region concurrent with the expansion of tall-statured shrubs and trees in the tundra. Changes in vegetation structure and function are expected to alter soil thermal regimes, thereby modifying climate feedbacks related to permafrost thaw and carbon cycling. However, current understanding of vegetation impacts on soil temperature is limited to local or regional scales and lacks the generality necessary to predict soil warming and permafrost stability on a pan-Arctic scale. Here we synthesize shallow soil and air temperature observations with broad spatial and temporal coverage collected across 106 sites representing nine different vegetation types in the permafrost region. We showed ecosystems with tall-statured shrubs and trees (>40 cm) have warmer shallow soils than those with short-statured tundra vegetation when normalized to a constant air temperature. In tree and tall shrub vegetation types, cooler temperatures in the warm season do not lead to cooler mean annual soil temperature indicating that ground thermal regimes in the cold-season rather than the warm-season are most critical for predicting soil warming in ecosystems underlain by permafrost. Our results suggest that the expansion of tall shrubs and trees into tundra regions can amplify shallow soil warming, and could increase the potential for increased seasonal thaw depth and increase soil carbon cycling rates and lead to increased carbon dioxide loss and further permafrost thaw.
  • Article
    Vegetation indices do not capture forest cover variation in Upland Siberian Larch Forests
    (MDPI AG, Basel, Switzerland, 2018-10-25) Loranty, Michael M. ; Davydov, Sergey P. ; Kropp, Heather ; Alexander, Heather D. ; Mack, Michelle C. ; Natali, Susan M. ; Zimov, Nikita S.
    Boreal forests are changing in response to climate, with potentially important feedbacks to regional and global climate through altered carbon cycle and albedo dynamics. These feedback processes will be affected by vegetation changes, and feedback strengths will largely rely on the spatial extent and timing of vegetation change. Satellite remote sensing is widely used to monitor vegetation dynamics, and vegetation indices (VIs) are frequently used to characterize spatial and temporal trends in vegetation productivity. In this study we combine field observations of larch forest cover across a 25 km2 upland landscape in northeastern Siberia with high-resolution satellite observations to determine how the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) are related to forest cover. Across 46 forest stands ranging from 0% to 90% larch canopy cover, we find either no change, or declines in NDVI and EVI derived from PlanetScope CubeSat and Landsat data with increasing forest cover. In conjunction with field observations of NDVI, these results indicate that understory vegetation likely exerts a strong influence on vegetation indices in these ecosystems. This suggests that positive decadal trends in NDVI in Siberian larch forests may correspond primarily to increases in understory productivity, or even to declines in forest cover. Consequently, positive NDVI trends may be associated with declines in terrestrial carbon storage and increases in albedo, rather than increases in carbon storage and decreases in albedo that are commonly assumed. Moreover, it is also likely that important ecological changes such as large changes in forest density or variable forest regrowth after fire are not captured by long-term NDVI trends.