About this Research Topic

Background

Global climate warming disproportionately affects the ecosystems of the high-latitude cold regions, which can facilitate agricultural expansion, urban growth, and natural resource development, adding growing anthropogenic pressures to cold regions’ landscapes, soil health, and biodiversity. These changes are accompanied by changes in vegetation cover, the thermal regime of soils, fluxes, and timing of nutrient export to aquatic ecosystems, emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), and the mobilization of organic carbon and geogenic contaminants, among others. Thus, climate warming generates a set of interrelated changes in (hydro)geophysical properties, hydro(geo)logical flows, biogeochemical processes, and ecosystem functions in the world’s cold regions.

Future climate uncertainties highlight the need to identify and predict the major controls on soil biogeochemical functioning in cold regions under variations in the magnitude and timing of snow processes, ice cover, permafrost thaw, and freeze-thaw cycles. However, significant uncertainties prevail in quantifying and predicting the hydro(bio)geochemical processes of terrestrial ecosystems in cold regions. Further advances in the predictive understanding of how cold regions’ processes, functions, and ecosystem services respond to climate warming and land-use changes require multiscale monitoring technologies coupled with integrated observational and modeling tools.

This Research Topic will focus on cross-disciplinary research that advances our mechanistic understanding of the soil biogeochemical processes and microbial-plant interactions in cold regions. This Research Topic aims to bring together hydrologists, biologists, ecologists, soil scientists, biochemists, and geochemists working on the cold regions science to share cutting-edge research on subsurface hydro(bio)geochemical processes, with an emphasis on the fate and transport of carbon, nutrients, metals, and micro-pollutants in response to climate change in cold region ecosystems. We particularly welcome submissions of new, developing, novel methodologies, and coupled experimental and modeling approaches that address the role of dynamic climatic and hydrological conditions on modulating (bio)geochemical processes of nutrients and contaminants, carbon fluxes, as well as the coupling/decoupling of microbial and plant interactions in sub-snow and cold region environments.

Keywords: cold regions, environmental change, biogeochemical processes, climate warming, groundwater quality, climate change, carbon, nutrients, contaminant, plant-microbe interactions, ecosystem, metals, pollutants, fate and transport

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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