Red spruce

Picea rubens, commonly known as red spruce, is a species of spruce native to eastern North America. This tree ranges from Newfoundland westward through Pennsylvania and on to Minnesota. It is found in White Mountains of New England as high as 5000 feet and in the Adirondacks and Alleghany Mountains to about 4000 feet.

The tree is a member of the family Pinaceae, the largest family of conifers. Like the other spruce species, Picea ribens has long strong trunks with a scaly bark, and dense narrow branches that can extend to the ground in open-grown trees.

Spruce trees are considered very hardy. They are evergreen trees, often conical. The timber of the red spruce is quite strong. The tree sometimes attains a height of about 100 feet (30 meters).

The tree ranges along the Alleghany Mountains as far south as Georgia. Some of the better timber from this tree is used for piano sounding boards, but the majority is used for pulp wood, for sheathing and flooring in building construction.

Red spruce is an important, but is declining component of eastern North American forests and it is a species characteristic of mature Acadian forests. Atmospheric pollution, acid deposition and deforestation are the principle causes of its decline throughout it arrange.

Late-successional species, including red spruce have decline in abundance and age in Prince Edward Island as a result of selective forest exploitation and clearing for agriculture.
Red spruce

Temperate coniferous forests

Temperate coniferous forest is biome in temperate regions of the world with warm summers and cool winters with adequate rainfall.

Evergreen conifers predominate in these forests, a mixture of conifers and broadleaf evergreen trees may also be found.

Temperate coniferous forests are found mainly between latitudes 40° and 65° in the northern hemisphere. They stretch across major parts of northern Europe, Asia, North America, Siberia and the Northern region of Asia.

In Far East Asia temperate coniferous species and their vegetation types are distributed according to latitudinal ranges reflecting climatic gradients.

They occur in the cold temperate zone, the cool temperate zone and the orotemperate belt in the warm temperate zone, and the oroboreal belt in the temperate zone. The first may also be subdivided according to continentality from suboceanic to ultra-continental.

Most of the trees in temperate coniferous forests are softwoods such as spruce, pine, cedar and fir. In North America, spruce and fir are the most common and they are occasionally found together with a few broadleaf species such as birch and poplar.

In temperate coniferous forests, the warm, moist conditions are suitable for a number of amphibians, namely several types of frogs and salamanders. Reptiles such as snakes and lizards, which are also cold-blooded, live in temperate forests as well.

However, only three species of amphibians are known to live in the taiga biome: mink and wood frogs and blue spotted salamanders.
Temperate coniferous forests

Siberia world largest forest

Some 78 percent of Russian’s 764 million hectares of forested land is in Siberia and the Far East with the remaining 22 percent in European Russia.

Forested land in Siberia represents nearly 19 percent of the world’s forested area and possibly 25 percent of the word’s forest volume.

In the past Siberia was not considered an important timber because it is an extremely cold region where trees grow slowly, so regeneration of the cut down forest will take several centuries.

The Siberian winters are notorious for its length and severity, Minimum temperature of -90 °F (-68° C) have been recorded.

The major vegetation zones spread east-west-tundra in the north; swampy taiga forest over most Siberia; forests steppe and steppe in the southwest and in the intermontane basins in the South.

Siberia is divided into three major ecological and economic regions, West Siberia, East Siberia and the Far East. The percentage of forest cover is 53%, 57% and 45% of the total area, respectively.

Siberian forests are shape by complex interactions of climate, forest fires, insect outbreaks, and humans. 

Conifers are the dominant species group throughout Siberia. Pine is the main species in West Siberian forest landscapes, but larch (Larix sibirica) dominates in other region.

Larch is cold tolerant and grows well on permafrost. Because of the permafrost soils, the root system extend out laterally in thin organic rich soils over the frozen ground and this may account for the more open condition of the forest.
Siberia world largest forest

Conifers forest

Coniferous means the trees have cones, so called because they are shaped like a geometric cone.

One end of a cone is typically a bit smaller while the other flares out like a three-dimensional triangle.

There are about 630 species of conifers world-wide. A continuous continental distribution of conifers is found in Eurasia, North America and in Mountainous regions.

The most common are pines, spruces and firs – the evergreen generally thought of as Christmas trees. 

Conifers are one of the world’s most important resources of timber.

Hemisphere, these resources are vast and will, if managed wisely and used sustainably, provide wood for a multitude of purposes virtually indefinitely.

Taiga is a coniferous forest chiefly found in the northern temperate one. Conifers are well adapted to an environment so cold that water is usually frozen throughout the winter. Conifers retain their leaves which are adapted to conserve water.

Conifers also dominate temperate lowlands along the Pacific coast from Alaska into northern Californian.
Conifers forest