Boreal Forest Description and Threats

The boreal forest, also known as Taiga, lies to the south of the tundra and to the north of deciduous forests and grasslands. It is the terrestrial biome with the lowest annual average temperature after the tundra and permanent ice caps. The boreal forest has a subarctic climate with very large temperature range between seasons, but the long and cold winter is the dominant feature. In Siberian taiga the average temperature ranges from 21 degrees Fahrenheit and -58 degrees Fahrenheit. Taiga soil tends to be young and poor in nutrients. It lacks the deep, organically enriched profile present in temperate deciduous forests. The thinness of the soil is due largely to the cold, which hinders the development of soil and the ease with which plants can use its nutrients. The taiga receives a fairly low amount of precipitation throughout the year, it’s mostly in the form of rain in the summer months but can also be from fog and snow. With snowmelt and low temperatures, there is little evaporation in the summer, so the ground is usually very moist during the growing season. The growing seasons are short, typically less than 3 months. Many plant species are found in the Taiga, but coniferous trees are the dominant plant form.  These trees shed snow easily, and they retain their needles through the winter. The needles themselves are well-adapted, with thick waxy coatings and small surface area, to resist cold conditions and minimize water loss, an important consideration even in the swampy taiga where water may be frozen much of the year. These adaptations mean that even in cool conditions, if the temperature rises above freezing during the day then photosynthesis can happen. Broadleaf plants usually lose their leaves at the onset of freezing conditions in the fall and will not regrow them until most of the danger of frost has passed. This means that the growing season of broad-leafed trees is much shorter than it is for coniferous trees, and the advantage the coniferous trees gain allows them to dominate in the cold taiga climate. Numerous animal species are found in coniferous forests. The primary consumers are small mammals such as rabbits, voles, mice, shrews and other rodents. Large grazing animals also act as primary consumers. These animals include caribou, reindeer, moose and deer. In the taiga the top tertiary consumers are the bobcat (or Lynx) and wolves. There are many swamps, mountains and forests in the Taiga that are home to the Bobcat. Throughout much of the United States the bobcat lives in forests, but can also be found in desserts and chaparral. Wolves eat ungulates, or large hoofed mammals, like elk, deer, moose and caribou. Wolves are also known to eat beaver, rabbits and other small prey. Wolves are also scavengers and often eat animals that have died due to other causes like starvation and disease. The big story in the taiga is adaptation to winter cold and snow. The Snowshoe Hare with its large paws and white fur is well adapted for life in the snow.  Other animals will burrow beneath the snow and forage for their food in tunnels on and in the forest floor so that they are insulated from the cold by the snow.

White Spruce Trees With Snow

Boreal Forest Overview 

Bobcat

Lynx

Some major threats to the Boreal Forest would most certainly be deforestation & logging, as well as oil mining, urbanization, and of course, climate change. Industrial development is an ever-growing force of human activity that will continue to impact many of mother nature’s biomes. It provides jobs and income for many communities throughout the boreal forest. Human’s industrialization leaves a footprint of natural resource extraction that encompasses an average area of 180 million acres largely due to forestry, hydropower, mining, and oil/gas extraction. “More than 30% of the Canadian Boreal Forest has been reserved for some form of current or future industrial development overall” Each year more and more resource roads are being pushed further up north into the heart of the boreal forest. Unless carefully managed these forests are very slow to regrow and corporate pressures may reduce the amount of management and/or accelerate cutting beyond what can be sustained. I’d say the most important threat to the boreal forest is industrial development and its effects such as climate change. As with most other biomes, such as the temperate forest, industrialization plays a huge role in the threats to the environment. Not to mention, on top of industrialization tearing down forests and clearing land, the pollution that is being let out into the atmosphere and into our waterways due to the developments.

A typical person in Keene plays an equal part as anyone in the threat of climate change to our biomes. The more industrialization and economic growth the more pollution we are creating and forcing into our natural areas. We throw cigarette butts on the ground, we don’t recycle our plastic bottles, we don’t compost our food, we drive cars that emit gasoline fumes into the air, we eat food that is processed by machines powered off of the oil and gas that we extract from our biomes. It’s a constant and repeating cycle, and we are all a part of it.

Click To View Video On Environmental Threats to the Boreal Forest