One of nature’s woody behemoths — the North American snow forest — may soon begin shrinking.
But for two decades, the ecosystem’s northern tree line has held fast, while its southerly tree cover has thinned, researchers report June 8 in Nature Communications. Human activities and climate change could push the prodigious forest to contract.
“We are about to transform an entire biome on a continental scale,” says environmental scientist Ronny Rotbarth of Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
Millions of people — many from Indigenous groups — depend on the boreal forest to live. It’s thought to contain about 25 percent of Earth’s remaining intact forest, and its living flora are estimated to store about 15 billion metric tons of carbon. That exceeds what global fossil fuel burning emitted last year.
2023-06-29 07:00:00
Original from www.sciencenews.org