Quantifying rates of biome shifts under climate change in arctic and boreal ecosystems

Our objective is to evaluate the ability of arctic and boreal ecosystems to keep pace with climate change, quantifying temporal and spatial variation in biome shifts and vegetation-climate feedbacks across a large latitudinal gradient in central Siberia.

Boreal forests store a massive amount of carbon (approximately 30-50% of the carbon worldwide), but these forests are facing multiple threats. At these high latitudes, temperatures are rapidly increasing, causing increases in wildfire and insect outbreaks and causing permafrost (frozen soil) to thaw, releasing more carbon into the atmosphere. Also, the pressure to harvest timber from this region is growing. Attempts to predict how climate change will affect boreal forests have not adequately addressed all these disturbances (i.e. wind, insects, fire and harvest), resulting in great uncertainty about how climate change will affect this biome. Perhaps the biggest unknown is how much climate change will cause conversions from tundra to forest and forest to grasslands and how much these changes will feed back to the climate system to worsen climate change. Our project will address these uncertainties while enhancing international research collaboration through conferences, seminars and workshops in the U.S., Austria and Russia. We will also support STEM education of middle school students through ASRA, the Alaska Summer Research Academy, a field-based, science camp in Alaska.