as recreational use of snow covered areas increases, the potential impacts on those ecosystems also increases, there have been a few studies that have looked at various impacts from noise, pollution, habitat destruction, trail erosion but very little in looking at the impact of recreation on the subnivean space utilized by small animals, the impacts include cross country ski areas, backcountry ski and snowboard use, snowmobile, other various over snow transport, alpine ski runs and lifts combination of literature review and snow compaction experiment