The Taiga Forest, Russia

The biome known as taiga, or tayga, is typified by coniferous forests that are mostly composed of pines, spruces, and larches. It is sometimes referred to as boreal forest or snow forest. The biggest land biome on Earth is the taiga, sometimes known as the boreal forest. It encompasses the majority of inland Canada, Alaska, and portions of the northern contiguous United States in North America. Most of Sweden, Finland, a large portion of Russia from Karelia in the west to the Pacific Ocean (including much of Siberia), a large portion of Norway and Estonia, a portion of the Scottish Highlands, some lowland/coastal areas of Iceland, and parts of northern Kazakhstan, northern Mongolia, and northern Japan (on the island of Hokkaido) are all included in Eurasia.

The main tree species differ globally based on summer temperatures and the duration of the growing season. Eastern Siberian taiga is a huge larch forest; Russian taiga has spruce, pines, and larches depending on the region; Scandinavian and Finnish taiga is a mixture of spruce, pines, and birch; and North American taiga is primarily spruce.With its current taiga covering land that was either mammoth steppe or under the Scandinavian Ice Sheet in Eurasia or under the Laurentide Ice Sheet in North America during the Late Pleistocene, it is a relatively recent phenomenon, having only existed for the last 12,000 years since the start of the Holocene epoch.

Taiga is not solely an alpine habitat; unlike subalpine forest, a large portion of taiga is lowland, even though it grades into alpine tundra at high elevations through Krummholz.
Not every culture uses the word "taiga" in the same way. In the English language, "taiga" refers to the more northern, arid regions that approach the tree line and the tundra, whereas "boreal forest" refers to more southern locations in the United States and Canada. The history of this differential use in North America and how it warps traditional Russian usage are covered by Hoffman (1958).Taiga are at risk from climate change, and there is debate about how carbon accounting should handle carbon dioxide emissions or absorption.Taiga makes up 11.5 percent of the Earth's surface area, roughly 17 million square kilometers (6.6 million square miles), which is second only to deserts and xeric shrublands.Canada and Russia have the greatest areas. The Norrland landscape is linked to Sweden's taiga.