The dead black spruce looked like a collection of giant burned matchsticks as far as Jennifer Baltzer could see. But here, at the edge of one of the largest areas of scorched forest that scientists have ever documented in Canada, what caught Dr. Baltzer’s attention was closer to the ground. The spruce seedlings were gone. Dr. Baltzer, a professor of forest ecology, was a few hundred miles below the Arctic Circle, where for over a decade she has studied the health of the black spruce and the boreal forests. She and three of her students from Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, were in the Northwest Territories to document what could grow from the ashes of the record-breaking fire season that had ravaged the forest almost a year earlier. …Dr. Baltzer said as she inspected the blackened landscape, she had never seen trees burn this soon after a previous fire. [to access the full story a NY Times subscription is required]