While investigating the use of the word “taiga” I noticed a few claims about the word which are not currently in etymonline’s entry. The first is that the Encyclopedia Britannica claims that the word in Russian literally means “land of the little sticks” - source is here. The second is that, in contrast to that, the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland claimed, in 1892, that the Russian meaning is “the world” - source is here. Lastly, wikipedia, in justifying a claim that the word is used slightly differently in Russia compared to Canada and the United States, links to a source dedicated to the meaning of the word, which I can’t read because it’s behind a paywall. source is here.
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Your third source comes from a 1958 article titled “The Meaning of the Word ‘Taiga’” from the journal Ecology (vol. 39, No. 3). The author asserts that taiga “has usually been interpreted by ecologists to mean the circumpolar coniferous forest zone which bounds the tundra on the south.” In the years immediately preceding the publication of the author’s article, however, other ecologists used the word “to refer to the ecotone between tundra and coniferous forest.” This resulted in various definitions including “forest border” (Leopold & Darling, 1953), “terrain of sparsely scattered trees” (Polunin, 1955), and “widely spaced trees” (Dansereau, 1957).
I did a bit more digging and found Robert M. M. Crawford’s Tundra-Taiga Biology (2013). A glossary at the end of the book says that taiga “has been taken from the Russian тайга and is of Turkik or Mongolian origin (cf Turkish dağ—mountain, Altai tayya—a forest-covered mountain).”
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wonderful! thank you 