Soil Climate In Mountainous Terrain.

Soil is the critical interface between physical and biological processes for much of the terrestrial world. This interface changes with location, which has important implications for food and fiber production as well as a number of associated ecosystem services. One way to quantify this important soil variability this is through the soil climate. It has been well understood for many years that the soil climate strongly influences important soil forming processes, microbial activity and associated carbon dynamics, as evidenced by the prominent role soil climate plays in soil classification. To date, however, there are few locations have compiled and published sufficient data to describe the soil climate. More commonly, the atmospheric climate is used to estimate soil conditions, which is less than satisfactory. In much the same way that that atmospheric climatology at a given location can only be understood in the context of latitude, proximity to oceans, surrounding land masses, etc, soil climate can only be understood in the context of local topography, soil properties, and vegetative cover in addition to the atmospheric climate. We have complied more than 30 years of soil climate data (soil temperature and water content depth profiles) at different elevations in the Reynolds Creek Experimental Watershed (RCEW) in southwestern Idaho. In addition to standard soil classification, we evaluate the relationships between elevation, snow cover and atmospheric climate and the soil climate. In addition, we evaluate soil climate stationarity and inter-annual variability. These are indicators of the impacts of climate change on soil conditions and the amount of data required to characterize the soil climate.