Ecosystem Management of the Boreal Forest in the Era of Global Change
Sylvie Gauthier, Timo Kuuluvainen, S. Ellen Macdonald, Ekaterina Shorohova, А. Shvidenko, Annie‐Claude Bélisle, Marie-Andrée Vaillancourt, Alain Leduc, Guillaume Grosbois, Yves Bergeron, Hubert Morin, Miguel Montoro Girona
Abstract
The boreal forest is a vast biome encompassing approximately one-third (30%) of the world’s forest area. It harbors about half of the world’s remaining natural and near-natural forests and provides important ecological, economic, social, and cultural services and values that benefit human communities (Burton et al., 2010 ; Gauthier et al., 2015a ). Although the diversity of tree species in boreal forests is low relative to that of other biomes, the forests’ structural and compositional variability and the diversity of ecological interaction networks are high (Burton, 2013 ; Isaev, 2012 , 2013 ; Kuuluvainen & Siitonen, 2013 ). The genetic diversity of tree species is generally high with most species being wind pollinated and characterized by large population sizes; this genetic diversity provides a foundation for an adaptive capacity in the face of fluctuating environmental conditions and ongoing climate change (Aitken et al., 2008 ).