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Northern expansion is not compensating for southern declines in North American boreal forests

Climate change is expected to shift the boreal biome northward through expansion at the northern and contraction at the southern boundary respectively. However, biome-scale evidence of such a shift is rare. Here, we used remotely-sensed tree cover data to quantify temporal changes across the North A...

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Autores principales: Rotbarth, Ronny, Van Nes, Egbert H., Scheffer, Marten, Jepsen, Jane Uhd, Vindstad, Ole Petter Laksforsmo, Xu, Chi, Holmgren, Milena
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10250320/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37291123
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-39092-2
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author Rotbarth, Ronny
Van Nes, Egbert H.
Scheffer, Marten
Jepsen, Jane Uhd
Vindstad, Ole Petter Laksforsmo
Xu, Chi
Holmgren, Milena
author_facet Rotbarth, Ronny
Van Nes, Egbert H.
Scheffer, Marten
Jepsen, Jane Uhd
Vindstad, Ole Petter Laksforsmo
Xu, Chi
Holmgren, Milena
author_sort Rotbarth, Ronny
collection PubMed
description Climate change is expected to shift the boreal biome northward through expansion at the northern and contraction at the southern boundary respectively. However, biome-scale evidence of such a shift is rare. Here, we used remotely-sensed tree cover data to quantify temporal changes across the North American boreal biome from 2000 to 2019. We reveal a strong north-south asymmetry in tree cover change, coupled with a range shrinkage of tree cover distributions. We found no evidence for tree cover expansion in the northern biome, while tree cover increased markedly in the core of the biome range. By contrast, tree cover declined along the southern biome boundary, where losses were related largely to wildfires and timber logging. We show that these contrasting trends are structural indicators for a possible onset of a biome contraction which may lead to long-term carbon declines.
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spelling pubmed-102503202023-06-10 Northern expansion is not compensating for southern declines in North American boreal forests Rotbarth, Ronny Van Nes, Egbert H. Scheffer, Marten Jepsen, Jane Uhd Vindstad, Ole Petter Laksforsmo Xu, Chi Holmgren, Milena Nat Commun Article Climate change is expected to shift the boreal biome northward through expansion at the northern and contraction at the southern boundary respectively. However, biome-scale evidence of such a shift is rare. Here, we used remotely-sensed tree cover data to quantify temporal changes across the North American boreal biome from 2000 to 2019. We reveal a strong north-south asymmetry in tree cover change, coupled with a range shrinkage of tree cover distributions. We found no evidence for tree cover expansion in the northern biome, while tree cover increased markedly in the core of the biome range. By contrast, tree cover declined along the southern biome boundary, where losses were related largely to wildfires and timber logging. We show that these contrasting trends are structural indicators for a possible onset of a biome contraction which may lead to long-term carbon declines. Nature Publishing Group UK 2023-06-08 /pmc/articles/PMC10250320/ /pubmed/37291123 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-39092-2 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Rotbarth, Ronny
Van Nes, Egbert H.
Scheffer, Marten
Jepsen, Jane Uhd
Vindstad, Ole Petter Laksforsmo
Xu, Chi
Holmgren, Milena
Northern expansion is not compensating for southern declines in North American boreal forests
title Northern expansion is not compensating for southern declines in North American boreal forests
title_full Northern expansion is not compensating for southern declines in North American boreal forests
title_fullStr Northern expansion is not compensating for southern declines in North American boreal forests
title_full_unstemmed Northern expansion is not compensating for southern declines in North American boreal forests
title_short Northern expansion is not compensating for southern declines in North American boreal forests
title_sort northern expansion is not compensating for southern declines in north american boreal forests
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10250320/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37291123
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-39092-2
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