Snow Measurements in Specific Canopy Structure and Aspect Regimes for the 2025 Water Year, North of Coal Creek, San Juan Mountains, Colorado, USA

This data release includes snow depth and snow water equivalent (SWE) for the water year 2025 during ten separate field campaigns that took place between late December and late May. The field area is comprised of 703 surveyed points in, on the perimeter of, and surrounding six flat field (‘no_slope’) forest openings, four northern hillslope aspect (‘north_slope’) forest openings and four southern hillslope aspect (‘south_slope’) forest openings next to Coal Creek off Coal Bank Pass in the San Juan Mountains in Southwest Colorado, USA. These measurements were taken to look at the relationship between snow accumulation and snowmelt patterns between forest gaps of various sizes and forest edges of various sizes (edge of forest gaps), and to determine how these relationships may modulate based upon hillslope aspect. Canopy metrics, including canopy height, total gap area, mean distance to canopy, canopy closure, leaf area index, non-directional edginess, canopy edginess with a southern aspect, and canopy edginess with a northern aspect were defined using aerial lidar data for the San Juan Mountains. These canopy metrics can be found in an affiliated data release titled, ‘High Resolution Canopy Structure and Density Metrics for Southwest Colorado Derived from 2019 Aerial Lidar.’ They are also included herein for the 703 surveyed points.