Drivers Of Landscape Change In The Northwest Boreal Region

The northwest boreal region (NWB) of North America is a land of extremes. Extending more than 1.3 million square kilometers (330 million acres), it encompasses the entire spectrum between inundated wetlands below sea level to the tallest peak in North America. Permafrost gradients span from nearly continuous to absent. Boreal ecosystems are inherently dynamic and continually change over decades to millennia. The braided rivers that shape the valleys and wetlands continually change course, creating and removing vast wetlands and peatlands. Glacial melt, erosion, fires, permafrost dynamics, and wind-blown loess are among the shaping forces of the landscape. As a result, species interactions and ecosystem processes are shifting across time. The NWB is a data-poor region, and the intention of the NWB Landscape Conservation Cooperative is to determine what data are not available and what data are available. For instance, historical baseline data describing the economic and social relationships in association with the ecological condition of the NWB landscape are often lacking. Likewise, the size and remoteness of this region make it challenging to measure basic biological information, such as species population sizes or trends. The paucity of weather and climate monitoring stations also compound the ability to model future climate trends and impacts, which is part of the nature of working in the north. The purpose of this volume is to create a resource for regional land and resource managers and researchers by synthesizing the latest research on the historical and current status of landscape-scale drivers (including anthropogenic activities) and ecosystem processes, future projected changes of each, and the effects of changes on important resources. Generally, each chapter is coauthored by researchers and land and natural resource managers from the United States and Canada.

Vegetation change has been observed across Arctic and boreal regions. Studies have often documented large-scale greening trends, but they have also identified areas of browning or shifts between greening and browning over varying spatial extents and time periods. At the same time, though, there are large portions of these ecosystems that have not exhibited measurable trends in greening or browning. These findings have fueled many questions about the drivers of vegetation dynamics, how trends are measured, and potential implications of vegetation change at local to global scales. In December 2018, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, convened a workshop to discuss opportunities to improve understanding of greening and browning trends and drivers and the implications of these vegetation changes. The discussions included a close look at many of the methodological approaches used to evaluate greening and browning, as well as exploration of newer technologies that may help advance the science. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

Forests throughout the world are undergoing rapid, far-reaching change as a result of natural and anthropogenic disturbances. The challenge is to manage these forests in ways that avoid formulaic approaches to complex issues. This book takes on the challenge of balancing local economies, wood products, and biodiversity by proposing diverse new approaches to forest management using new research from the moist coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest. --

This is the only book to focus on the geomorphological landscapes of Canada West. It outlines the little-appreciated diversity of Canada’s landscapes, and the nature of the geomorphological landscape, which deserves wider publicity. Three of the most important geomorphological facts related to Canada are that 90% of its total area emerged from ice-sheet cover relatively recently, from a geological perspective; permafrost underlies 50% of its landmass and the country enjoys the benefits of having three oceans as its borders: the Arctic, Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Canada West is a land of extreme contrasts — from the rugged Cordillera to the wide open spaces of the Prairies; from the humid west-coast forests to the semi-desert in the interior of British Columbia and from the vast Mackenzie river system of the to small, steep, cascading streams on Vancouver Island. The thickest Canadian permafrost is found in the Yukon and extensive areas of the Cordillera are underlain by sporadic permafrost side-by-side with the never-glaciated plateaus of the Yukon. One of the curiosities of Canada West is the presence of volcanic landforms, extruded through the ice cover of the late Pleistocene and Holocene epochs, which have also left a strong imprint on the landscape. The Mackenzie and Fraser deltas provide the contrast of large river deltas, debouching respectively into the Arctic and Pacific oceans.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Wildland Fire, Forest Dynamics, and Their Interactions" that was published in Forests

Drawing from a decade-long collaboration between Japan and Russia, this important volume presents the first major synthesis of current knowledge on the ecophysiology of the coniferous forests growing on permafrost at high latitudes. It presents ecological data for a region long inaccessible to most scientists, and raises important questions about the global carbon balance as these systems are affected by the changing climate. Making up around 20% of the entire boreal forests of the northern hemisphere, these ‘permafrost forest ecosystems’ are subject to particular constraints in terms of temperature, nutrient availability, and root space, creating exceptional ecosystem characteristics not known elsewhere. This authoritative text explores their diversity, structure, dynamics and physiology. It provides a comparison of these forests in relation to boreal forests elsewhere, and concludes with an assessment of the potential responses of this unique biome to climate change. The book will be invaluable to advanced students and researchers interested in boreal vegetation, forest ecology, silviculture and forest soils, as well as to researchers into climate change and the global carbon balance.