Abstract
The boreal forest represents a third of the planet's forest cover, i.e. 400 million hectares in North America and more than double that in Eurasia (Johnson 1992, Shugart et al. 1992). It is one of the largest terrestrial reservoirs of carbon (sequestered mainly in soils and biomass) and therefore plays a part in balancing the planet's climate (Dixon et al. 1994). Since the end of the last ice age, the two disturbances that have governed its natural dynamics have been fires and insect invasions (Johnson 1992, Shugart et al. 1992, Jardon et al. 2003, Hély et al. 2010, Blarquez et al. 2015), but forest cutting has also played a significant role over the last century or so (Gauthier et al. 2015b). In Canada, fires are very intense (crown fires) and destroy standing stands (Johnson 1992), but species have developed very effective regeneration strategies (Gauthier et al. 1996, Ali et al. 2008). Over the last few thousand years, climate change has led to significant changes in fire regimes (frequency and surface area), yet the few species that make up the boreal forest have been maintained (Remy et al. 2017b). In fact, it is on this basis of the impact of natural disturbances that sustainable forest management in Canada has been based for about two decades (Bergeron et al. 1999, Harvey et al. 2002, Gauthier et al.