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The expedition will gather insights about modern vegetation patterns, and past changes in N-Western Canada in contrast to the boreal forest and the northern treeline in Eurasia. Further, these investigations in North America are needed to narrow the knowledge gap of why deciduous forest taxa dominate the Siberian treeline in contrast to evergreen in North America. Our aim is to understand regionally specific boreal vegetation changes in current climate warming for simulating past and future dynamics with an individual-based spatially explicit forest model (LAVESI). Therefore, our intentions are: 1. creating needleleaf and broadleaf tree stand inventories at diverse bioclimatic and environmental settings by a space-for-time approach 2. map forest structure by UAV remote sensing and upscale to satellite data across environmental gradients Vegetation cover and its underlying soils will be investigated by the following methods: (1) sampling boreal forest taxa at equal distances (c. 50 km) along the bioclimatic gradient for inference of biogeography and genetic connectivity; (2) first census of tree stand inventory and ground vegetation surveys at diverse plots (natural undisturbed vs. disturbed by human impact, wildfire) including investigation of representative tree and shrub individuals of each present taxa along with sampling for dendrochronological and biomass analyses; (3) soil sampling for environmental DNA, pollen, charcoal, nutrients from each plot; (4) ground & airborne surveys for multispectral and LiDAR 3D point cloud generation of vegetation and microtopography over short transects covering gradients of land surface cover; (5) at sites where it is possible and permitted setup monitoring sites by instrumenting soils with humidity and temperature and trees with tree-growth logger (dendrometer) for long-term monitoring (15 min interval, over 1+ years).