Natural disasters may be hard to schedule, but a fire in the boreal is as certain as death: any given tree in the boreal forest can expect to burn once in a century, give or take fifty years. Fire is the principal mechanism by which the boreal forest purges and regenerates itself, to the point that the cones of several keystone conifer species, including black spruce, will not drop their seeds unless they are heated to temperatures unachievable by sunlight alone. Not only do these blasts of intense heat open the cones, releasing the seeds inside, they also indicate that fire has cleared the
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