NEW BRUNSWICK — Anthony Taylor is an associate professor with the University of New Brunswick specializing in the relationship between forestry and climate. He demonstrated the link between tree diversity and carbon sequestration in a 2023 paper published in the journal Nature, comparing these two metrics on 406 sample plots across the country. …Taylor has been expanding his research into the domains of drought and wildfires, both of which will become more common in coming decades. Here too, he’s found the diversity of trees in a given forest is a good indicator of how well they’ll weather a warming world, not only absorbing carbon, but holding onto it. …Maintaining a natural blend of coniferous and deciduous species in Maritime forests, therefore, would mean sequestering more carbon and suppressing more wildfires, but as Taylor outlined, regional forest management practices have been pushing in the opposite direction for decades.