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Decomposition of organic matter in high latitude biomes makes a significant contribution to global fluxes of nutrients and carbon and is expected to accelerate due to climate change. The majority of studies have focused on decomposition during the growing season, but winter climate is expected to change dramatically. Furthermore, knowledge of the drivers of organic matter decomposition, such as litter chemical composition, has primarily been tested across the growing season so it is unknown whether these drivers are also important during the winter. Given that the depth of snow cover insulates the sub-nivean climate from the much colder air, it is an important control on winter decomposition and is expected to be influenced by climate change, we experimentally manipulated snow cover to simulate impacts of different winter precipitation scenarios on soil processes. Our results show that despite snow reduction …