A unique look at the boreal forest, Earth’s vast and vital wilderness. The boreal forest, the planet’s largest land biome, spans the northern regions like “a scarf around the neck of the world.” Besides providing homes for many species, the forest’s influence is far-reaching: its trees and wetlands clean our air and water and are helping slow global climate change. In this evocative tour, a lyrical fictional narrative is paired with informational sidebars that describe life in the forest throughout the year, from one country to another. One of the world’s most magnificent regions comes to vivid life through the art of storytelling.

The boreal forest is buried in ice and snow during winter. But in summer lakes teem with fish, and bogs swarm with insects. Follow a snowshoe hare, beavers, a lynx, and other animals as they survive a year in this endangered landscape.

In Canada alone, the boreal forest (also called the taiga) covers more than 1.5 million square miles, fully one-third of the country and 20 percent of the entire North American continent. Terminating to the north with the treeless tundra, this region is inhabited and utilized by indigenous people and is home to unique populations of plants and animals found nowhere else on the planet. J. David Henry challenges the perception of the boreal forest as an "economic wasteland" by explaining how economically and ecologically valuable it is. He begins by answering some common questions about the region and explains its intricate geology. An in-depth examination follows of three factors that play an enormous role in shaping the complex life of the boreal forest: snow, forest fires, and peatlands. Henry looks at the dynamics of the region's vegetation and the evolution of its animals, and discusses the fascinating ten-year predator-prey cycle of snowshoe hares and Canadian lynx, one of the most famous examples of ecological interconnection. In Canada's boreal forest, loggers have clear cut an area the size of Great Britain. The final portion of the book examines initiatives from Scandinavia and Finland in order to offer alternatives to large-scale logging and mining, suggesting how humans can live and work in the boreal forest in a sustainable and responsible manner.

The world's boreal forests, which lie to the south of the Arctic, are considered to be the Earth's most significant terrestrial ecosystems. A panel of ecologists here provide a synthesis of the important patterns and processes which occur in boreal forests and review the principal mechanisms which control the forest's patterns.

The boreal forest is one of the world's great ecosystems, stretching across North America and Eurasia in an unbroken band and containing about 25% of the world's closed canopy forests. The Kluane Boreal Forest Ecosystem Project was a 10-year study by nine of Canada's leading ecologists to unravel the impact of the snowshoe hare cycle on the plants and the other vertebrate species in the boreal forest. In much of the boreal forest, the snowshoe hare acts as a keystone herbivore, fluctuating in 9-10 year cycles, and dragging along secondary cycles in predators such as lynx and great-horned owls. By manipulating the ecosystem on a large scale from the bottom via fertilizer additions and from the top by predator exclosures, they have traced the plant-herbivore relationships and the predator-prey relationships in this ecosystem to try to answer the question of what drives small mammal population cycles. This study is unique in being large scale and experimental on a relatively simple ecosystem, with the overall goal of defining what determines community structure in the boreal forest. Ecosystem Dynamics of the Boreal Forest: The Kluane Project summarizes these findings, weaving new discoveries of the role of herbivores-turned-predators, compensatory plant growth, and predators-eating-predators with an ecological story rich in details and clear in its findings of a community where predation plays a key role in determining the fate of individuals and populations. The study of the Kluane boreal forest raises key questions about the scale of conservation required for boreal forest communities and the many mammals and birds that live there.

The Boreal forest is the northern-most forest in the world, whose organisms and dynamics are shaped by low temperature and high latitude. The Alaskan Boreal forest is warming as rapidly as any place on earth, providing an opportunity to examine a biome as it adjusts to change. This book looks at this issue.

Easy to use field guide provides detailed information about plants in the region extending from Alaska to western Ontario. 800 colour photographs and 900 line drawings.