Jessie Young-Robertson, University of Alaska Fairbanks (IMAGE)

University of Alaska Fairbanks

Jessie Young-Robertson, University of Alaska Fairbanks

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Young-Robertson found that deciduous trees took up a surprisingly large amount of water in the period between snowmelt and leaf-out. These trees absorbed 21 to 25 percent of the available snowmelt water -- to the point of being completely saturated. For the boreal forest of Alaska and Western Canada, this equates to about 17-20 billion cubic meters of water per year. That is roughly equivalent to 8 million Olympic-sized swimming pools or 8-10 percent of the Yukon River's annual discharge.

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Jessie Young-Robertson

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