Phantom trees, zombie fires, a deadly fungus: a tale of Subarctic Forests
Tuesday, Feb 25, 2025
1:30pm - 3:00pm
Lecture by:
Jennifer Baltzer
In boreal and arctic regions, climate warming is occurring at rates that are 4x faster than the global average. This is resulting in widespread and rapid changes in our northern forests. Notably, wildfires are becoming larger, more frequent, and more severe with marked implications for the recovery of forests and the people and wildlife that rely on them. Layered on these fire related changes are changes in the pests and pathogens that can further undermine ecosystem resilience and alter forest recovery trajectories. In this lecture, I will discuss these various changes and what this means for the face of Canada’s boreal forests.
About Jennifer Baltzer
Jennifer Baltzer
Dr. Jennifer Baltzer is a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Forests and Global Change at Wilfrid Laurier University (Laurier), whose work focuses on the drivers of forest composition, structure and function and responses of these systems to global change. She has worked in a range of systems from the tropics to the tundra but currently leads an extensive boreal forest research program throughout the Northwest Territories. Her interdisciplinary research program examines the impacts of climate warming, including permafrost thaw, wildfire regimes, and biome shifts, on the distribution and function of high latitude boreal forests and its implications for northern communities. Within Canada, she works closely with the Government of the Northwest Territories (GNWT) through a 20-year Partnership Agreement between the GNWT and Laurier. Dr. Baltzer plays leadership roles in NASA’s ABoVE campaign, the Smithsonian Institute’s ForestGEO Network, and the CFREF-funded Global Water Futures program. In 2017, Dr. Baltzer was elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.