资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Refugia are habitats that allow organisms to persist when the environment makes persistence impossible elsewhere. The subnivium-the interface between snowpack and ground-is an important seasonal refugium that protects diverse species from extreme winter temperatures, but its future duration is uncertain with climate change. Here, we predict that subnivium duration will decrease from 126 d (2010-2014) to 110 d (2071-2100), which we have inferred using past and future duration of frozen ground with snow cover (D-sc) derived from remotely sensed datasets and climate projections. Concomitantly, duration of frozen ground without snow cover (D-fwos) at mid-latitudes is predicted to increase from 35 d to 45 d, with notable increases in the western United States, Europe, the Tibetan Plateau and Mongolia. In most areas, increasing winter temperatures were more important than precipitation for decreasing D-sc and increasing D-fwos. Thus, counter-intuitively, warming climate will cause longer D-fwos at mid-latitudes, causing functional winter cooling for subnivium-dependent organisms.