Satellites reveal Canada's shifting treeline is capturing more carbon
Melser R, Coops NC, Travers-Smith H, Wulder MA, Derksen C
Climate Adaptation
The slow creep of spruce and other conifers into what used to be open tundra is a change you could track yourself on a multi-year hike near the treeline, and it turns out that creep is quietly boosting how much carbon these northern landscapes pull out of the air.
Researchers combined satellite data on plant greenness, land temperature, soil moisture, and freeze-thaw cycles to map plant growth across the vast, hard-to-monitor zone where Canada's boreal forest fades into tundra, at a scale detailed enough to see individual land patches instead of blurry averages. They found that as the treeline shifts north with warming, plant growth and carbon capture in that zone increase measurably, adding up to a meaningful boost in how much carbon these ecosystems can store over the next hundred years.
Key Findings
The CAN-TG model produced 30-meter resolution GPP estimates that matched independent satellite carbon and fluorescence data with strong accuracy (R2 ≈ 0.91 and 0.88)
Annual GPP increased by 0.12-0.36 g C per square meter for every 1 km the treeline shifts northward
Projected treeline advance could raise total annual GPP by 0.77-2.32 Tg C per year across the study region over the next 100 years
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists built a detailed satellite-based model to track plant growth and carbon uptake along Canada's boreal-tundra treeline at a resolution 100 times finer than before, revealing that as trees advance northward with warming, the region will absorb more carbon over the next century.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Monitoring fine-scale gross primary productivity along the Canadian treeline through multi-source remote sensing.
Vegetation productivity along the northern treeline is undergoing rapid change in response to climate warming. Due to sparse in situ flux data, remotely sensed data are essential in monitoring the ...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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