Climate and Growth in the Boreal Forest

摘要

Studies correlating climate records and tree-growth in the boreal forest have important implications for predicting future growth and aboveground carbon storage under various climate scenarios. The Alaska boreal forest is one of the largest forest regions in the United States, is largely free of human disturbance, and has experienced a major climate warming since the 1970s. In work by Glenn Juday and Valerie Barber, hundreds of tree disks and cores were collected from black and white spruce and birchthroughout interior Alaska to determine climate sensitivity, future growth scenarios under a warming climate, and potential for carbon credits and storage. Doctoral candidate Martin Wilmking has also collected over one thousand cores from treeline white spruce in the Brooks and Alaska ranges.