Discover Top Posts Tagged with #boreal forests

October in Northern Manitoba

#manitoba #canada #boreal forests #statues #sharp-tailed grouse #geese #canada goose #churches #power lines #signs #small towns #my photos #my places #anfpv

Lessons From a Burning Forest. (New York Times)

As a reporter, I’ve experienced the aftermath of several disasters, including dam bursts, landslides and floods. But nothing quite prepared me to witness the extent of the destruction in Canada’s boreal forests that I saw in June, one year after the record-breaking wildfires of 2023.

At one point, my colleague Bryan Denton and I drove for an entire hour and saw almost no living trees in the forests we could see from the road. Much of the landscape was covered with blackened stumps of trees that burned last year. Residents told us the burned trees revealed hills, rivers and towns that they had never seen before.

I’ll be open with you: It was alarming.

We were there reporting how parts of North America’s boreal forests are failing to regrow because of the more frequent, bigger wildfires that have become a hallmark of our changing climate. One of the strongest pieces of evidence of this shift is the gradual decline of the black spruce, a humble species that has dominated these landscapes for thousands of years.

In short, my article shows how the dwindling number of black spruce trees is deeply transforming this vast ecosystem, which is one of the planet’s biggest storage systems for planet-warming carbon dioxide. What’s troubling is that black spruce evolved to exist with fire — just not fire that happens this often.

Losing any part of the black spruce forests will make the global struggle to keep temperatures below catastrophic levels harder, and it may mean our climate models are too optimistic.

But I also want to share what researchers and local Indigenous leaders told me: There is a lot we can do to adapt, particularly borrowing from traditional fire-management practices. These won’t save the immense boreal forests from global warming, but they could help communities adapt.

Indigenous people are some of the most directly affected by this new age of wildfires. According to government figures from April, 80 percent of First Nations communities in Canada are in wildfire-prone areas.

Many First Nations elders say they have been forced to change their traditional fire-management practices.

For centuries, Indigenous Canadians burned their lands during the spring, when the grass was dry and the forest was wet, in what are known as cultural burns. Elders looked for cues that can’t exactly be marked on a calendar, like signs the local snow was almost ready to melt, or when the ducks started to nest, as elders in Alberta explained in a 1979 documentary.

These burns protected their homes from insects, induced lush sprouting that attracted animals they hunted, and, perhaps most crucially, fireproofed their communities. The flames weren’t hot enough to kill the trees, just burn branches and leaves that, if left unattended, could fuel bigger fires during summer.

But near the end of the 19th century, Canada started banning cultural burns and fining anyone who practiced them. Slowly, what were meadows became flammable forests, and blazes grew harder to control, Cardinal Christianson said. “This idea of fire suppression or fire exclusion has got us in this problem,” she told me.

In 2020, a paper published in the journal Nature found that fire suppression increased the risk of wildfires for many communities in the Canadian boreal forest.

#wildfires #forests #boreal forests

Canada's logging industry's campaign against federal caribou recovery plans ignores years of scientific research showing that habitat protection for the boreal caribou is urgently needed. Almost fifteen years after being listed under Canada's Species at Risk Act, it's time for...

With an October 5 deadline for provincial caribou protection plans looming, the logging industry’s trade association in Canada is once again trying to delay protections for boreal woodland caribou (boreal caribou)—a species that has been listed as threatened for almost 15 years under Canada’s Species at Risk Act (SARA)...

#caribou #deer #ungulate #mammal #endangered #boreal #boreal forests #canada #animals #nature #conservation #environment #north america

The NRDC's Issue With Tissue report for 2022 shows that many major toilet paper companies are destroying Canada's boreal forest.

Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:

The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has just released its Issue With Tissue report for 2022, and while it does show some progress in regards to sustainable bathroom tissue, the findings also show that many major toilet paper companies are destroying Canada’s boreal forests. Boreal forests are crucial to our planet, as they store 30% to 40% of land-based carbon.

In the new scorecard, the NRDC notes that major companies, including P&G, Kimberly-Clark and Georgia-Pacific have received F scores for top brands such as Angel Soft, Charmin, Cottonelle and Quilted Northern. These companies are sourcing virgin forest fibers from primary boreal forests for their toilet tissue products. Other retailers, including Aldi, Lowe’s, Home Depot and Walmart, also received F scores for their toilet paper.

Scores were based on factors including percentage of recycled content, percentage of virgin fibers, FSC certification, the bleaching process, and for products made with virgin fibers or non-FSC bamboo, the judges determined whether or not the fibers were sourced from primary forests.

While many of the 60 toilet paper products surveyed received Fs, there were an increasing number of products earning higher markings with more sustainable options for consumers. Twelve products received A or A+ scores.

Some of the top marks went to Trader Joe’s, Green Forest and Natural Value. H-E-B’s Field and Future toilet paper, Kroger’s Simple Truth toilet paper, Target’s Everspring toilet paper and Seventh Generation Extra Soft & Strong toilet paper were among those earning A scores.

#paper companies #Canada #boreal forests #toilet paper

Scenes from the North Woods

#north woods gothic #upper midwest gothic #owls #winter #boreal forests #minnesota #lonely roads #great gray owl #barred owl #boreal owl #my photos #my places #regional photosets

A new study warns that boreal forests are fast approaching a tipping point.

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

From 2007 to 2017, land-based ecosystems like the vast boreal forests of Canada and the Amazon rainforest removed roughly a third of anthropogenic carbon emissions from the atmosphere. According to a slate of new scientific research published this week in Nature, however, the threats that climate change poses to these terrestrial carbon sinks are greater than previously understood.

A new study from a research team at the University of Michigan found that even a relatively small temperature increase of 1.6 degrees Celsius associated with climate change can have drastic effects on the dominant tree species in North American boreal forests, including reduced growth and increased mortality.

This vast and nearly entirely intact boreal forest biome, stretching across the Canadian landmass and some of the northern U.S., below tundra and above more temperate forest, consists primarily of coniferous spruce, pine, and fir species. The research team found that modest warming increased juvenile mortality in all nine tree species common in boreal forests, and that it also severely reduced growth in northern conifer species such as balsam fir, white spruce, and white pine.

While the study also found that increased warming boosted the growth of some broadleaf hardwood species like certain oaks and maples, which are more common in the temperate south, these trees are probably too sparse to take the place of disappearing conifers. The ecosystem is likely to enter an entirely “new state,” according to the study.

“That new state is, at best, likely to be a more impoverished version of our current forest,” Reich told the university news office. “At worst, it could include high levels of invasive woody shrubs, which are already common at the temperate-boreal border and are moving north quickly.”

#boreal forests #climate change

Scenes from Alaska

#alaska #northern gothic #bears #lynxes #northern lights #boreal forests #my photos #my places #regional photosets #muskox #ssiuonfpv

The vast expanse of the boreal forest, Yukon–Koyukuk, Alaska

Taken August 2020

#haul road #boreal forests #conifers #bogs #alaska #owls #lynxes #great grey owl #dalton highway #sunsets #my photos #my places #ssiuonfpv