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The climate is changing in many temperate forests with the amount of forest area dominated by sugar maple experiencing an insulating snowpack expected to shrink between 49 and 95% compared to 1951-2005 values. A reduced snowpack and increased depth and duration of soil frost can injure or kill fine roots, which are essential for plant water and nutrient uptake. These adverse impacts on tree roots can have important impacts on tree growth and ecosystem carbon sequestration. We evaluated the effects of changing winter climate, including snow and soil frost dynamics, by using tree cores to measure sugar maple radial growth rates in the Soil Freezing Study plots at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest. These data were gathered as part of the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study (HBES). The HBES is a collaborative effort at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, which is operated and maintained by the USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station. Analysis of these data are published in: Reinmann AB, Susser JR, Demara EMC, and Templer PH. 2019. Declines in northern forest tree growth following snowpack decline and soil freezing. Global Change Biology. 25(2):420-430. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14420 

Changes in growing season climate are often the foci of research exploring forest response to climate change. By contrast, little is known about tree growth response to projected declines in winter snowpack and increases in soil freezing in seasonally snow‐covered forest ecosystems, despite extensive documentation of the importance of winter climate in mediating ecological processes. We conducted a 5‐year snow‐removal experiment whereby snow was removed for the first 4–5 weeks of winter in a northern hardwood forest at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire,USA. Our results indicate that adverse impacts of reduced snowpack and increased soil freezing on the physiology ofAcer saccharum(sugar maple), a dominant species across northern temperate forests, are accompanied by a 40 ± 3% reduction in aboveground woody biomass increment, averaged across the 6 years following the start of the experiment. Further, we find no indication of growth recovery 1 year after cessation of the experiment. Based on these findings, we integrate spatial modeling of snowpack depth with forest inventory data to develop a spatially explicit, regional‐scale assessment of the vulnerability of forest aboveground growth to projected declines in snowpack depth and increased soil frost. These analyses indicate that nearly 65% of sugar maple basal area in the northeastern United States resides in areas that typically experience insulating snowpack. However, under theRCP4.5 and 8.5 emissions scenarios, we project a 49%–95% reduction in forest area experiencing insulating snowpack by the year 2099 in the northeastern United States, leaving large areas of northern forest vulnerable to these changes in winter climate, particularly along the northern edge of the region. Our study demonstrates that research focusing on growing season climate alone overestimates the stimulatory effect of warming temperatures on tree and forest growth in seasonally snow‐covered forests.