Mapping Heterogeneity in the Boreal Forest of North America

Abstract:

It is a common misconception that the boreal forest is a uniform carpet of trees stretching around the top of the globe. In fact, the boreal forest is an extremely heterogeneous and dynamic landscape. This has become even clearer through the use of remote sensing, which finally gives us a high resolution view of the entire boreal forest on the continental scale. The complexity of the boreal forest biome, however, is still often over simplified and poorly parameterized in global climate models. Advances in remote sensing and data analysis technology now give us the ability to map the heterogeneity and spatial complexity of the entire North American boreal forest. This study presents such a map and some analysis and observations of patterns in the data. We found that the boreal forest was dominated by many small land cover patches with high diversity of forest cover types. This map has and will continue to provide its own insight into the spatial structure of the boreal forest but will also provide important spatial heterogeneity metrics to improve land-atmosphere interactions in climate models.