Hemiboreal

Hemiboreal means halfway between the temperate and subarctic (or boreal) zones. The term is most frequently used in the context of ecosystems.

Botany

A hemiboreal forest will have some of the characteristics of a boreal forest, and also share some of the features of the temperate-zone forests to the south. Coniferous trees predominate in the hemiboreal zone, but a significant number of deciduous species such as oaks, maples, ash trees, birches, beeches, hazels and hornbeams will be found there as well.

Climate

The term is also sometimes used to denote the form of climate that is characteristic of the zone of hemiboreal forests — specifically, the climates designated Dfb, Dwb and Dsb in the Köppen climate classification scheme. On occasion, it is applied to all areas that have cold winters and long, warm (but not hot) summers — including those which are semiarid and arid based on average annual precipitation.

Examples

Examples of locations where the climate and/or ecosystem is classified as hemiboreal include:

• much of southern Canada (all of southeastern Canada except for parts of southern Ontario as well as the central Prairie Provinces outside the grasslands),
• within the United States: most of the states of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, and the northern parts of the states of New York, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, along with eastern North Dakota,
• in Eurasia: central Sweden, lowland areas of southern Norway north to Trondheim, southernmost coast of Finland (coast area between cities Kotka and Turku), all Estonia, all Lithuania, all Latvia, all Belarus and Ukraine,
• a wide swath of Russia, extending eastward into the southern parts of Siberia the Russian Far East and parts of Hokkaido, Japan.