Climate change in Minnesota is altering the forests

Excerpts from an interesting longread at the Washington Post:

Birds from southern Minnesota are now popping up far north in Ely, on the edge of the famous Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Splashes of red maple leaves are now visible each fall amid the pines and spruces of the iconic North Woods, where they once would have been harder to find.

Frelich, the director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Forest Ecology, thinks that if the state's warming trend remains unchecked, such subtle changes will become starker and more devastating in the decades ahead. He thinks the boreal forests that soak up huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could disappear entirely, taking with them a third of the state's native species of trees, flowers, birds and pollinators.

In an extreme scenario, he has warned, prairie land could expand across much of Minnesota by 2100, upending everything from the timber industry to tourism to the state’s very identity...

Minnesota is home to a landscape like none other in the United States. It has the boreal forests to the north, with their stately conifers and the moose and lynx that roam them; temperate forests in the middle, dominated by deciduous trees such as oak and maple; and prairie stretching to the south and west.

But rising temperatures are altering those boundaries...

Palik pointed out bitternut hickory from southern Minnesota and Illinois. Black cherry and white oak, whose historical range has been 100 miles or more to the south. Ponderosa pine from Nebraska and South Dakota.

What is becoming clearer over time is that the nonnative trees from warmer, drier climates are largely thriving here...

This resonates with me because the Chippewa National Forest in northern Minnesota is my favorite stomping ground for summer vacations.  The article details studies being done by forestry professionals and interventions they are testing to ameliorate the anticipated changes in the climate.