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Susan Dickerson-Lange

Forests strongly influence snow processes and affect the amount and duration of snow storage on a landscape. Therefore, forest changes, from management activities or natural disturbances, have important consequences for spring and summer soil moisture availability, aquatic habitat, and water supply. Accounting for these effects of forest change on watersheds will become even more important under warming climate conditions, which will reduce the amount and duration of snow storage. In this webinar, Susan E. Dickerson-Lange presents on Northwest Climate Science Center supported research that led to the creation of a conceptual model that paired relevant spatial datasets for considering the combined impacts of forest...
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Forest Management Tools to Maximize Snow Retention under Climate Change
Climate change is projected to cause earlier and less snowmelt, potentially reducing water availability for terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and for municipal and agricultural water supplies. However, if forested landscapes can be managed to retain snow longer, some of these environmental and financial impacts may be mitigated. Results from our research team demonstrate that in the Pacific Northwest (PNW), opening dense forest canopies through creating forest gaps will generally lead to more snow accumulation and later melt (i.e., up to 13 weeks later). However, under certain conditions, such as locations on ridges with high wind speeds and sunny south-facing slopes, the snow that accumulated in the forest is...
Abstract (from http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/15/01/JCOM_1501_2016_A01): Whereas the evolution of snow cover across forested mountain watersheds is difficult to predict or model accurately, the presence or absence of snow cover is easily observable and these observations contribute to improved snow models. We engaged citizen scientists to collect observations of the timing of distributed snow disappearance over three snow seasons across the Pacific Northwest, U.S.A. . The primary goal of the project was to build a more spatially robust dataset documenting the influence of forest cover on the timing of snow disappearance, and public outreach was a secondary goal. Each year's effort utilized a different strategy, building...
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