My backyard adjoins the thousand-acre wood that makes up the north campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Several times over the last few decades that I’ve been employed as a science writer, I have written stories set within this large chunk of mostly undisturbed boreal forest. Today, a researcher visited me here in response […]
On these nights, a male boreal owl has been singing from a wooden owl box near our home. The late biologist Dave Klein attached the nest box to a black spruce tree north of the University of Alaska Fairbanks ski trails many years ago. In search of a mate, the owl sings his haunting little […]
As boreal forest wildfires increase in severity and frequency, new patterns of post-fire recovery are emerging. Research led by Jill Johnstone and colleagues at the U.S. National Science Foundation-supported Bonanza Creek Long-term Ecological Research site found that recent wildfires led to changes in tree species dominance that are persisting through post-fire succession in Alaska’s boreal forests. Boreal black […]
A new study shows that as those fires scorched a region of boreal forest the size of Maryland, they released half as much carbon back into the atmosphere as all the plants, shrubs and trees in Canada typically store in an entire year. The Arctic is warming faster than any other region on Earth, and […]