Standardized monitoring of permafrost thaw: a user-friendly, multi-parameter protocol

Climate change is destabilizing permafrost landscapes, affecting infrastructure, ecosystems and human livelihoods. The rate of permafrost thaw is controlled by surface and subsurface properties and processes, all of which are potentially linked with each other. Yet, no standardized protocol exists f...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Arctic Science
Main Authors: Boike, Julia, Chadburn, Sarah, Martin, Julia, Zwieback, Simon, Althuizen, Inge H. J., Anselm, Norbert, Cai, Lei, Coulombe, Stéphanie, Lee, Hanna, Liljedahl, Anna K., Schneebeli, Martin, Sjöberg, Ylva, Smith, Noah, Smith, Sharon L., Streletskiy, Dmitry A., Stuenzi, Simone Maria, Westermann, Sebastian, Wilcox, Evan James
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: 2021
Subjects:
Arctic
Climate change
permafrost
Online Access:https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/54587/
https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/54587/1/Standardized_monitoring_of_permafrost_thaw_a_user-friendly_multi-parameter_protocol.pdf
https://doi.org/10.1139/AS-2021-0007
https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.28c1b2f7-70e9-4a4f-aa67-aa4464e4ba93
https://hdl.handle.net/
Description
Summary:Climate change is destabilizing permafrost landscapes, affecting infrastructure, ecosystems and human livelihoods. The rate of permafrost thaw is controlled by surface and subsurface properties and processes, all of which are potentially linked with each other. Yet, no standardized protocol exists for measuring permafrost thaw and related processes and properties in a linked manner. The permafrost thaw action group of the Terrestrial Multidisciplinary distributed Observatories for the Study of the Arctic Connections (T-MOSAiC) project has developed a protocol, for use by non-specialist scientists and technicians, citizen scientists and indigenous groups, to collect standardized metadata and data on permafrost thaw.The protocol introduced here addresses the need to jointly measure permafrost thaw and the associated surface and subsurface environmental conditions. The parameters measured along transects are: snow depth, thaw depth, vegetation height, soil texture, and water level. The metadata collection includes data on timing of data collection, geographical coordinates, land surface characteristics (vegetation, ground surface, water conditions), as well as photographs. Our hope is that this openly available dataset will also be highly valuable for validation and parameterization of numerical and conceptual models, thus to the broad community represented by the T-MOSAIC project.

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