A new study.. has found that fire may be changing boreal forests in a way researchers did not previously anticipate. Historically, fires in North American boreal forests have led to coniferous trees being supplanted by deciduous trees, which take up more carbon, leading to cooling and decreased likelihood of fire. The study, led by Northern Arizona University and published in Nature Climate Change, found that surprisingly, while forests do become more deciduous, they don’t stay that way; a few decades later, the same forests gradually start to shift back toward coniferous trees. Researchers also found that the abrupt loss of coniferous forests caused by wildfire was offset by the gradual increase in coniferous forests in areas that had not recently burned, so there was no overall shift toward deciduous cover. …”This was somewhat surprising because several recent studies suggested there were shifts at local to regional scales,” said researcher Logan Berner.