55 seconds

Dr. Andrea Lloyd says:

The major question that we're trying to answer then, is whether spruce forests are expanding at altitudinal treeliine and at latitudinal treeline. And the way we're doing that is by looking at the age structure of spruce populations down there in the continuous forest and up here in this area that we're calling above treeline. And what you might expect to find if spruce forests were expanding would be that spruce would be very old down there in the continuous forest limit and that as you get up here above treeline, you'd find younger and younger spruce. And in fact right now we're standing right next to this beautiful spruce seedling that's probably 30 or 40 years old and there's another one over right next to it. And if you look around this above treeline area, you can see, in fact, that there are a whole bunch of spruce seedlings and spruce saplings that suggests that spruce have, in recent years, at least been able to regenerate quite well above treeline.