The boreal forest, covering much of Canada and Alaska, and the treeless shrublands to the north of the forest region, may be among the worst impacted by climate change over the next 500 years, according to a new study. The study, led by researchers at the White Rose universities of York and Leeds, as well as Oxford and Montreal, and ETH, Switzerland, ran a widely-used climate model with different atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to assess the impact climate change could have on the distribution of ecosystems across the planet up to the year 2500. The research is published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Most climate prediction models run to the year 2100. …Modeling climate change over a 500 year period shows that much of the boreal forest, the Earth’s northernmost forests and most significant provider of carbon storage and clean water, could be seriously impacted, along with tundra regions.