Taiga is the largest terrestrial biome on Earth. It covers North America and Eurasia. It's absolutely mind-boggling how much land area is taken up by taiga. Sometimes this biome is called northern coniferous forest or perhaps boreal forest, and really it's dominated by conifers. The reason for that is because conifers are both cold tolerant and water loss resistant. Hopefully, you can see by how far north this biome is, it's going to get very cold there. Additionally, drought is common, which is why the waxy needle-like leaves of conifers are well-suited to this biome.

Now the Arctic Tundra is the northernmost terrestrial biome. It basically runs along the northern edge of the land masses in the northern hemisphere. Year-round it is cold, super cold. In fact, it's so cold year-round that it has what's called permafrost, which is basically soil that remains frozen all year round. It also has very low precipitation. So this is clearly not an easy place to live, yet life finds a way, as you can see from this image behind me. I don't want to harp about global warming, but I do want to say that the amount of permafrost, that is the area considered permafrost, has been shrinking at a pretty alarming rate due to global warming.

Now with that, let's go ahead and flip the page.