New study finds black spruce trees struggling to regenerate amid more frequent arctic fires

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A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), finds that black spruce trees—a key species on the boreal landscape for millennia—are losing their resilience and capacity to regenerate in the face of warming temperatures and increasingly frequent Arctic wildfires. A continuation of this trend could result in a landscape-wide ecological shift that would have a complex and rippling impact on the region, including an acceleration in permafrost thaw, and a loss of valuable biodiversity.

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