Table of Contents
The News
What are Boreal Forests?
- The boreal forest or “taiga” is the world’s largest land biome and accounts for close to 25 percent of the planet’s forested areas.
- The boreal biome principally spans 8 countries: Canada, China, Finland, Japan, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States.
- Most boreal landscapes are characterized by a low diversity of tree species, of which gymnosperms such as Abies, Larix, Pinus, and Picea species usually dominate, with varying proportions of angiosperm Populus, Betula, and Alnus species.
What are Boreal Forests?
The Research
- In the study, ecologist Logan Berner and remote sensing expert Scott Goetz, both from Northern Arizona University, used Landsat satellite images from 1985 to 2019 to examine changes in land cover.
- The researchers found that along the southern edge of boreal forests, conditions there are now too hot and dry for the trees to survive. And to the north, the scientists found that the temperatures gave become more hospitable for trees, like conifers.
FYI
The Details
- Before the Berner and Goetz’s work, these forests had been projected to move northward because of climate change, but whether the entire biome was shifting remained uncertain.
- Berner & Goetze based their conclusions based on – Greening & Browning
- In northern latitudes, warmer temperatures lead to longer growing seasons, which speed up forest development.
- Meanwhile, temperatures along the southern edge are becoming too hot to sustain forest growth, leading to browning.
- Comparing greening and browning rates from 1985 to 2019 with a database of soil nitrogen levels uncovered a previously overlooked effect: Areas experiencing greening tended to have high soil nitrogen levels.
The Details
- The rate of greening over the past 2 decades revealed that the shift is slowing.
Berner:
- “With continued climate change, we’re likely to see actually a contraction of the boreal forest overall, because the rate at which trees die is much faster than the rate at which they’re able to expand”
- Tree mortality along the southern border will increase carbon dioxide in the atmosphere if the forests aren’t replaced with plants that are equally good at fixing carbon.
- Increasing tree cover in the north will cause this region to absorb more sunlight, further warming the region, while vegetation also traps snow that insulates permafrost, potentially causing it to melt and lead to the release of methane and carbon dioxide.
Beware..!!
- Greening & Browning will have a trickle-down effect that will include changes in wildlife, temperature levels, droughts, and forest fires. These devastating events could have a monumental impact on the boreal forest biome in the next few decades.
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