A Systems Analysis of the Global Boreal Forest

by Herman H. Shugart (Editor)

The boreal forests of the world, geographically situated to the south of the Arctic and generally north of latitude 50 degrees, are considered to be one of the earth's most significant terrestrial ecosystems in terms of their potential for interaction with other global scale systems, such as climate and anthropologenic activity. This book, developed by an international panel of ecologists, provides a synthesis of the important patterns and processes which occur in boreal forests and reviews the principal mechanisms which control the forests' pattern in space and time. The effects of cold temperatures, soil ice, insects, plant competition, wildfires and climatic change on the boreal forests are discussed as a basis for the development of the first global scale computer model of the dynamical change of a biome, able to project the change of the boreal forest over timescales of decades to millennia, and over the global extent of this forest.

577 pages, Hardcover

First published March 27, 1992

About the author

Herman H. (Hank) Shugart
W.W. Corcoran Professor of Environmental Sciences & Director, Center for Regional Environmental Studies

Regions of Interest:
Global

Research:
Global change, systems ecology, systems analysis and modeling, forest ecosystem analysis and dynamics, ornithology.

Hank Shugart is a Highly Cited™ Scientist and 2006 University of Virginia Distinguished Scientist.

Hank is a systems ecologist whose primary research interests focus on the simulation modeling of forest ecosystems. He has developed and tested models of biogeochemical cycles, energy flow and secondary succession. In his most recent work, he uses computer models to simulate the growth, birth and death of each tree on small forest plots. The simulations describe changes in forest structure and composition over time, in response to both internal and external sources of perturbation. The models are applied at spatial scales ranging in size from small forest gaps to entire landscapes and at temporal scales of years to millennia.

Abstract: Herman H. ("Hank") Shugart, Jr. is the W.W. Corcoran Professor of Environmental Sciences and the Director of the Center for Regional Environmental Studies at the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Georgia in 1971, and worked for the next 13 years in Tennessee -- eventually as a Senior Research Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and as a Professor in Botany and the Graduate Program in Ecology at the University of Tennessee. In 1984, he moved to his current position at University of Virginia. Dr. Shugart has also served as a Visiting Fellow in the Australian National University (1978-1979, 1993-1994), in Australia's Commonwealth Industrial and Scientific Research Organization, Division of Land Use Research (1982) and Division of Wildlife and Ecology (1993-1994), in the International Meteorological Institute at the University of Stockholm, Sweden (1984), and in the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria (1987,1989). He has served on the editorial board of several scholarly journals including Ecology and Ecological Monographs, Annual Reviews in Ecology and Systematics, Biological Conservation, Landscape Ecology, Journal of Vegetation Science, Forest Science, Global Change Biology and The Australian Journal of Botany. He is the author of more than 300 publications including 11 books, 60 book chapters and 90 papers in peer-reviewed journals.