As the last bits of snow on Mount Washington melt away in early summer, they’re providing more for the alpine ecosystem than their soggy remnants may suggest.
According to research from the Appalachian Mountain Club, those lingering snow banks seem to help protect rare alpine plants from some effects of climate change. Where deep snow persists through spring and early summer, plants can stay protected, possibly faring better as temperatures rise.
But, researchers say, as the atmosphere warms up, the snow itself may not be resilient to climate change. The plant communities it helps, then, could suffer.
Jordon Tourville is an ecologist with the Appalachian Mountain Club and an author of the new study on snowy alpine environments. He says plants that hide under a snowy blanket until summer time are safer from harsh alpine conditions, and benefit from a rush of soil moisture and nutrients as snow melts.
“It's a pretty cushy life for these plants,” he said, “which may be threatened if those snow dynamics change.”
Tourville’s team studied small pockets of these special snowy plant communities on Mount Washington with the hope that it could help land managers across the globe think about protecting their own alpine environments.
Anecdotal evidence shows that snow in parts of the Presidential Mountains lasted until August during the mid 1900s. Now, snow is expected to last until about June and come back in October. And researchers project that New Hampshire will continue to lose snowpack over time.
“If you think of the snow banks as like a little circle of habitat, with this shallower snow on the edges and the deeper snow in the middle, as things warm up, the edges will go first,” Tourville said.
On the edges of melting snow banks, plant species that have had a refuge from some effects of climate change may start to suffer. Invasive species like dandelions may begin to encroach.
All of this depends on how much warmer the atmosphere gets. But Tourville’s team, which included an author from the U.S. Forest Service, studied different ways to protect the snowy plant communities on Mount Washington going forward in preparation for some of the changes that could happen.
The options include adding fences to keep snow piled up, removing invasive species, or collecting seeds from threatened species to preserve them or grow and replant them. The team also looked at ways to monitor the plants, including asking trained ecologists or botanists to survey snow banks over time.
The alpine plants protected by snow in New Hampshire host a lot of biodiversity, and they could be helping the pollinators that exist in the alpine zone, Tourville said. But they’re very small groups of plants. The study could also be useful for other, larger snowy plant communities in places like the Alps or the Rockies.
“Hopefully it's the first step in a conversation about how we can better coordinate management of these really cool systems,” Tourville said.
