NEW PUBLICATION
Ecosystem Dynamics of the Boreal Forest Ecosystem: the Kluane Projects
Published 2001 by Oxford University Press
Editors: C.J. Krebs, S. Boutin, and R. Boonstra.
Available from the Oxford University Press. See their web site for details:
http://www.oup-usa.org/isbn/0195133935.html.
The boreal forest is one of the world's great ecosystems, stretching across
North America and Eurasia in an unbroken band and containing about 25% of the
world's closed canopy forests. In Canada about 84% of our forested lands are
boreal forest.
This project was a ten-year study by nine of Canada's leading ecologists to
unravel the impact of the snowshoe hare cycle on the plants and the other
vertebrate species in the boreal forest. In much of the boreal forest, the
snowshoe hare acts as a keystone herbivore, fluctuating in a nine- to ten-year
cycles, and dragging along secondary cycles in predators such as lynx and great
horned owls. By manipulating the ecosystem on a large scale from the bottom via
fertilizer additions and from the top by predator exclosures, they have traced
the plant-herbivore relationships and the predator-prey relationships in this
ecosystem. This study is unique in being large scale and experimental on a
relatively simple ecosystem, with the overall goal of defining what determines
community structure in the boreal forest.
The study of the Kluane forest raises key questions about the scale of
conservation required for boreal forest communities and the many mammals and
birds that live there.