"We are not living in normal times, and every American knows it." Daniel Sherrell writing in The Guardian
Nestled between the tundra of the Arctic and the mixed deciduous and conifer forests to the south is the largest biome on earth. The boreal forests are also known as the Taiga, making up one-third of forests still standing on the planet. These forests are known as circumpolar as the vast expanse covers the land area in most parts of Canada, Alaska, northern Scotland, Russia (including Siberia), and Scandinavia. The land is flat with some rolling plains, and they thrive in cold regions that do not get much rain.
Historically the Taiga does not receive warm and moist air, but they have in some abundance wetlands such as rivers, lakes, marshes, and bogs. Recent slumps in the permafrost due to the Arctic warming at least four times faster ( known as Arctic Amplification) than the rest of the earth, where thawing frozen soils fill these slumps with water, further degrading the stability of the permafrost with what is known in the north as drunken forests.
The Taiga does not have as much biodiversity compared to other biomes. But that does not mean that this area is not essential to the biosphere's survival. These forests store 208 billion tons of carbon, or 11% of the world's total" metric tons of carbon in biomass, dead organic matter, and soil.
The Financial Times notes that climate change and Putin's war risk the Taiga's survival.
The boreal ecosystem has historically sucked up more carbon than it releases, because of the massive amount of carbon dioxide it uses when photosynthesising during long hours of summer sunlight.
The resulting vegetation does not have time to fully decompose before the freezing winter sets in and this mossy “duff” builds up on top of frozen soil, or permafrost. Both are often stuffed with carbon, making the boreal forests the biggest land-based carbon store on Earth. They currently store more carbon than is currently found in the atmosphere — and twice as much as all human-caused emissions since 1870.
But as subarctic temperatures rise, this vital ecosystem is losing stability with swelling fire activity, thawing permafrost and insect infestations. More tree cover has been lost to fire in the boreal region over the past decade than anywhere else on Earth.
The transformations in these northern forests could trigger the ecosystem to reach a tipping point where it starts releasing more carbon than it absorbs, potentially for centuries to come.
This could be catastrophic for humanity’s efforts to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5C.
“People often talk about how to get carbon out of the atmosphere, but there has been far less focus on how to keep massive carbon stores in the ground,” says Anthony Swift, Canada director of the Natural Resources Defense Council.“The boreal is an under-reported story but one that absolutely has to increase in prominence. There has been a great deal of focus on tropical forests for good reasons . . . but what’s been happening in our global northern forests has been off the radar.”
Siberian forests have been on a cooling trend for seven thousand years. But that changed rapidly beginning in the nineteenth century. The Great Acceleration (population increase and rapid industrialization) has ended the cooling trend and ushered in unprecedented regional heating.
"Due to changes in the Earth's orbit we would have expected a continuous, slow and gradual decrease of incoming summer solar energy and thus temperature at the subpolar latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere during last 8-9 millennia. However, how recorded by the trees growing in Yamal, this cooling trend has been interrupted in the middle of the 19th century, when temperature began to rise very quickly and reached the highest values in recent decades," says Rashit Hantemirov, Leading Researcher of the Laboratories of Dendrochronology of the Ural Branch of the RAS and Natural Science Methods in the Humanities of UrFU.
Independently of the period length considered (from 30 to 170 years), the most recent period was the warmest. Not only the temperature has reached unprecedented warm levels, but also the rate of temperature increase (i.e. since the last 160-170) hasn't been as fast as after the middle of the 19th century.
"The exceptionality of the modern warming is corroborated by observations that the last century was characterized by a total lack of cold extremes contrasted by the occurrence of 27 extreme warm years, 19 of which have fallen in the last 40 years," specifies Rashit Hantemirov.
Vladimir Putin has eliminated all corroboration with other world climate scientists after western democracies imposed sanctions after his murderous rampage in Ukraine. As a result, a lot of data is missing, but western satellites have been taking measurements of forest cover, methane release from permafrost, and expansive wildfires across the region.
There can be a lot of damage from deforestation in the Taiga, as a study by Science Direct highlights below:
Hydrological responses to forest harvesting in boreal forests are reviewed based on three spatial scales and within an increased and broad disturbance context.
•
At the stand level, forest harvesting greatly alters snow processes, decreases evapotranspiration (ET) and water use efficiency (WUE), and negatively reduces soil infiltration.
•
In small watersheds, forest harvesting consistently increases spring freshets and overland flows, and alters the SW-GW interactions, while it often increases annual streamflow but with contradictory results observed in Siberia.
•
For larger watersheds and regions, forest harvesting is part of cumulative forest disturbance, which produces more varied and complicated hydrological responses.
•
With increasing of spatial scales, hydrological responses to forest disturbance are more varied and even contradictory due to more complicated interactions among forest disturbance, climate, and watershed properties at larger scales.
In yet another warning to humanity, a new study has found that we either protect all of the world's trees from extinction or endure the wrath of ecological catastrophe.
A new paper predicts severe consequences for people, wildlife and the planet’s ecosystems if the widespread loss of trees continues. “Last year, we published the State of the World’s Trees report, where we showed at least 17,500 tree species, about a third of the world’s 60,000 tree species, are at risk of extinction,” said Malin Rivers, lead author of the paper and head of conservation prioritisation at Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI). “Now we want to highlight why it matters that so many tree species are going extinct.
“Without acting now, it will impact humanity, our economies and livelihoods. Ecologically, it will have a catastrophic impact on the planet.”
snip
The large-scale extinction of tree species would lead to major biodiversity losses. Half of the world’s animal and plant species rely on trees as their habitat, with forests containing about 75% of bird species, 68% of mammal species and as many as 10 million species of invertebrates. Forest-dependent species have already declined by about 53% since 1970. “When we look at extinction risks for mammals or birds, underlying that is habitat loss, and habitat loss is often tree loss,” said Rivers. “If we don’t look after trees, there’s no way we can look after all the other life there.”
The extinction of a single tree species can significantly alter an ecosystem, causing a domino effect in its ability to function. When eucalyptus and dipterocarp trees are destroyed, for example, forests are more at risk from fire, pests and disease.