Wildfires are becoming a serious challenge in North America, becoming more frequent and widespread, posing a major environmental, health and economic challenge to the region. Here, Jennifer Baltzer, a forest ecology professor, examines a stand of burned black spruce trees near the village of Behchoko in Canada’s Northwest Territories. The dead black spruce trees look like giant, burnt-out matches, towering above the gray landscape as far as the eye can see. But here, on the edge of one of the largest burned forest areas ever documented by scientists in Canada, Baltzer’s attention was closer to the ground. A few hundred miles below the Arctic Circle, Baltzer has been studying the health of black spruce and boreal forests for more than a decade.
One hot morning in late spring, she and three of her students at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada were trying to document what might grow from the ashes of the record-breaking fire season that had devastated the forest nearly a year earlier.
That morning, she noted, she had never seen trees burn so quickly after a fire. The boreal forests of western Canada are among the largest in the world, and they have evolved to burn once every century or so. But this patch of forest had just burned for the third time in just a decade. As a result, many of the slow-growing spruce trees will have no chance of survival. Scientists say the decline of the black spruce is profoundly threatening what for millennia has been one of the largest carbon-dioxide storage systems on Earth, a crucial tool in keeping the atmosphere from warming even more than it has already.
More frequent and widespread wildfires, fueled by climate change, pose a huge challenge to black spruce, a species that has long dominated these landscapes. But its rapid decline, due to cyclical fire seasons, is one of the strongest evidence yet that the new era of wildfires is not only threatening people with smoke that pollutes the air across North America, but also challenging nature and its ecological balances.
(Photo courtesy of The New York Times)
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