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High peaks offer the last vestige for vanishing cool-climate species

out frThe fight for survival is nothing new for high-elevation species in Southern Appalachia.

After the glaciers receded at the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago and temperatures warmed, remnants of a cold-weather forest in southern Appalachia were forced high up the mountain slopes. There, they hung on to small, ever-shrinking islands in the upper reaches of the Smoky Mountains — where the coniferous trees on the high peaks more closely resemble southern Canada than North Carolina.

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