Science and regulation. A White House mandate for more peer review.

www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 301 5 SEPTEMBER 2003 1307 C RE D IT :B IL L BO W M A N /U N IV ER SI TY O F C O LO RA D O A team of researchers has discovered a winter wonderland under the snow, populated by huge numbers and new kinds of microscopic fungi. These organisms are powerful, underappreciated drivers of tundra ecosystems, says Steven Schmidt, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Their presence could force researchers looking at global climate change to revisit their models of where and how much carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and other substances are produced, he adds. Until recently, researchers thought that cold temperatures suspended metabolism and growth of microorganisms in soil communities under the white blanket of snow. Schmidt, however, was puzzled to find that melting Colorado tundra snow released large amounts of organic nitrogen in the spring. Over the past 20 years, other biogeochemists had come across signs of life under the snow, such as unexpected quantities of methane and carbon dioxide. But only with the new study, on page 1359, is the extent of this hidden community revealed. Schmidt and his colleagues “demonstrate for the first time that undersnow soils are physiologically a very active environment,” says Ursula Peintner, a mycologist at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Schmidt’s graduate student, Christopher Schadt, made visits to a snow-covered grass meadow in the Rocky Mountains for 3 years. He took soil samples during winter, the spring snowmelt, and the dry, sunny summer. With the help of microbial ecologist David Lipson, now at San Diego State University in California, Schadt found that the weight and volume of the fungi—their biomass—fluctuated season-