Plant functional traits in the black sand extended growing season experiment, 2023.

Climate change is predicted to affect the alpine at a more rapid rate than other ecosystems. One predicted consequence is earlier snowmelt, which the Niwot Ridge LTER site Black Sand experiment aimed to replicate. Black sand was hand-spread across the early snowmelt treatment to cause a more rapid snowmelt than in the control plots. Sand was still spread across the control plots after snowmelt to control for the effects of the sand on vegetation. Each treatment also contained ITEX chambers which raised the temperature of individual plots. Within this larger experiment, we measured plant functional traits to see if they varied across the four treatments: control, control + ITEX, early snowmelt, and early snowmelt + ITEX.