Taiga << TY guh, >> also called boreal forest, is the evergreen forest that circles the Northern Hemisphere. It covers vast areas of Canada, Russia, and Scandinavia. The taiga includes some of the last great undisturbed forests on the planet. It is the largest terrestrial (land) biome, covering about 50 million acres (20 million hectares). A biome is a community of animals, plants, and other living things that covers a large geographic area.
The taiga has seasonal weather, with short, warm summers and long, cold winters. In the winter, a blanket of deep, powdery snow covers the ground. The snow keeps the ground near freezing temperature, even as air temperatures drop as low as –65 °F (–54 °C).
The forests of the taiga consist of conifer (cone-bearing) trees. The trees keep their needles through the year. They grow slowly and never reach great heights. In open areas, thick mats of lichens cover the ground. In dense forests, where little light reaches the forest floor, a layer of peat moss grows. The taiga also has many wetlands, including beaver ponds and bogs.
Animals of the taiga include bears, hares, lynxes, moose, rodents, and wolves. Large numbers of birds migrate to the taiga in the spring, taking advantage of the long hours of sunlight and abundant food. They leave as the weather turns cold. Animals that remain in the taiga the year around have adaptations to survive the cold. For example, they may develop thick winter fur or store fat for hibernation.
Many taiga animals go through cycles of booms (great abundances) and busts (steep declines) in their numbers. The most famous of these cycles is the lynx-hare cycle. Every 9 to 11 years, snowshoe hares become extremely numerous, before dying off in large numbers. With few hares to hunt, predators (hunting animals), such as the lynx, also crash to low levels. But predator numbers lag behind those of hares, reaching a peak about one year later. These cycles affect many other living things of the taiga biome.
