Ivan Prock, P.Eng., BEng, MS’ Post

#Wildfires #BritishColumbia "The prevalence of wildfires are partly a consequence of the hotter and drier forests due to climate change and partly the legacy of more than a century worth of forest management that prioritized timber production along with the suppression of fire to preserve that timber. “We’re learning the hard way (about) unintended consequences,” said wildfire ecologist Lori Daniels. “Some of those practices, although they seemed like they were going to be economically beneficial to us between 1950 and 1990, they’re catching up with us now.” Daniels, a professor in the UBC department of forests and conservation science, added that the costs include lost timber for the forest industry, less reliable drinking water in burned-over watersheds as hillsides become more prone to erosion, and harm to human health “from breathing smoke all summer.” ... Large areas of forests replanted after 2017 fires for timber, with lodgepole pine and fir seedlings, were simply scorched out again by drought during the 2021 summer heat dome. “Even some of the naturally regenerating conifers,” Daniels said. “Those seedlings died. They did not make it through the heat dome. They were too young, it (was) too hot, the soil moisture was far too dry, they simply desiccated.” In some cases, those formerly forested landscapes will be better off left to become grasslands because that will make them more resilient to climate change, as droughts are expected to become more common, Daniels said. However, researchers are learning more hopeful lessons in a patch of UBC’s research forest near Williams Lake where the land was left to let nature take its course after a small fire in 2013. Researchers put observation plots into the burn area right away and left it alone to “just see what the ecosystem does if we let it do its thing,” Daniels said. Data hasn’t been finalized from the most recent observation, but researchers have observed healthy growth of three-metre-high aspen and birch trees with a mix of healthy, naturally regenerated, metre-high lodgepole pine and Douglas fir seedlings growing happily in the shade of their deciduous cousins. “It’s just a small patch,” Daniels said. “So it’s not quite comparable to those big fires out on the (Chilcotin) plateau, but the lesson after 10 years, they’re really happy to grow, even though there’s supposedly all this competition from the broadleaf trees immediately around them.” That challenges Ministry of Forests dogma on reforestation, which prioritizes planting conifer species for their timber value and weeds out species such as aspen, alder and birch by spraying with glyphosate herbicides. However, the ministry says its practices and standards are shifting in light of what is being learned and its forest-landscape planning now gives priority to the health of forest ecosystems. ..."