The largest terrestrial biome on the planet is on the move – it’s heading north at an accelerated pace

The world’s largest terrestrial biome is changing rapidly, so Earth’s appearance from space will be subtly changing color.

According to , given the warming of temperatures, boreal forests they are gradually moving north, toward colder regions at the planet’s higher latitudes.

The boreal forest, also known as taigais a biome defined by vast coniferous forests made up of evergreen trees such as pine, fir and larch.

In addition to abundant flora, it is home to all kinds of wonderful fauna, from brown bears and moose, to bison and beaver, as well as owls, eagles and other rare birds.

The biome extends in a wide band across the upper regions of North America and Eurasia, enveloping the Northern Hemisphere as a green belt, which includes parts of Alaska, Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, Russia and some parts of Asia.

This location, however, means that this ecosystem is especially vulnerable to climate change.

It is estimated that the boreal forest biome is heat four times faster than the global averageputting enormous pressure on the rich wildlife that lives here.

In a new study in the journal Biogeosciences, researchers from terraPulse and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center tracked changes in boreal forests using the longest, highest-resolution satellite record of tree cover assembled to date.

Spanning the years 1985 to 2020, the data was analyzed by machine learning algorithms to process 224,026 images collected by Landsat 4, 5, 7 and 8 satelliteswhich produced incredibly detailed maps of tree cover across the boreal biome at a resolution of just 30 meters.

revealed a surprising rate of change. Over the 35 years, the boreal forest biome grew by 844,000 square kilometersan increase of around 12%. All of this growth occurred in the north, meaning the green belt has shifted toward the North Pole by an average of 0.29° latitude.

This expansion may seem like an optimistic trend, but the reality is more complex. Although there has been growth in the north, significant parts of the southern banks have been lost.

The growth of older forests was offset by new growth of young forests. Because small, juvenile trees are not as effective at “sucking” carbon from the atmosphere, the paper states that the recent trend may have “direct implications for the region’s role in the global carbon cycle”.

“These changes are not just spatially extensivebut also demographically consequentialas they reflect a growing fraction of young forests with distinct structural and functional attributes that position them as dynamic carbon sequestration agents. Understanding the contribution of these forests to current and future carbon reserves is essential to anticipate the net climate responses emerging from boreal ecosystems”, concludes the document.