While all kinds of discussions are taking place at various Conservation Societies and in some State Houses on how to keep the Boreal Forest that blankets Alaska, Canada, Washington, Idaho, Montana and Minnesota(northern sections) from becoming a "swiss cheese, pock marked" inferior version of it's historical self, Dennis Murray, a professor of ecology at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, thinks the dying moose of Minnesota and New Hampshire and elsewhere are one symptom of something far bigger – a giant forest ecosystem that is rapidly shrinking, dying, and otherwise changing.............. "The boreal forest is breaking apart," he says........... "The question is what will replace it?"..................Murray has been researching the boreal forest for 25 years, and he and his colleagues have seen many changes firsthand................. "In British Columbia, 80 percent of the province's mature lodgepole, another boreal species, have recently died from the mountain pine beetle, whose range and season both expanded greatly because of a warmer world".............. "White and black spruce, the main trees species in the boreal, are also dying in vast numbers"............. “The southwest Yukon looks dramatically different than it did 25 years ago when I did my master’s [degree]".......... “Everywhere you go there is deadfall"..................Murray’s modeling shows that a large gap is opening in the boreal in Ontario and Quebec, a gap some 500 by 350 kilometers.................. "It will essentially split the contiguous forest into two separate forests — one to the east, the other to the west — as the black spruce and white spruce disappear"................... "That gap could then become grassland or Carolinian, the forest ecosystem that dominates south of the boreal in Ontario, characterized by oak, maple, black walnut and other deciduous species"................. "As the spruce goes, so goes its inhabitants".............. "We're predicting there’s going to be no lynx, moose, or hare in central Ontario in the years to come, “so we’re going to have disjunct populations on either side"................ "It could cause a break between populations of species and a loss of genetic diversity"........... Murray has coined a term for the patchy quality of the effects of warming on the boreal – "climate fragmentation"............. “Because it’s a gradual transition, it won’t be real boreal and it won’t be real deciduous". “Ecosystems will likely be less stable and more open to invasives"

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Read Robbins' report.  12 OCT 2015: REPORT The Rapid and  Startling Decline Of World’s Vast  Boreal Forests Scientists are becoming  increasingly  concerned about the  fate of the huge  boreal forest that  spans from  Scandinavia to  northern Canada.  Unprecedented  warming in the  region is  jeopardizing the  future  of a critical  ecosystem that  makes  up nearly a third  of the earth’s forest  cover. by jim robbins Hare and Ritchie, 1972 The boreal forest extends around the earth at the top of the Northern Hemisphere. NOAA White spruce, shown above near the Denali Highway in Alaska, have been dying off in the boreal forest.