The onset of large, severe wildfires that threaten communities year after year has occurred earlier in British Columbia than previous research projected, an
The surge stems from a combination of climate change and entrenched forest management practices, which have together created a landscape more conducive to large, high-intensity blazes, says Lori Daniels, a professor in the department of forest and conservation sciences at the University of B.C.“The thing we can control in the short term is the vulnerability of the landscape.”
This season has smashed records for area burned in B.C. and Canada, with wildfires scorching more than 165,000 square kilometres across the country. Daniels says she previously thought the next generation of fire ecologists, not hers, would have to contend with the “new reality” of high-intensity wildfires.As communities expand farther into the wildland-urban interface, where forests meet human development, the paper shows summers in B.C. are increasingly characterized by hot, dry and windy conditions that are primed for wildfire to burn with speed and intensity that would almost certainly overwhelm suppression efforts.
It’s also common practice to remove broadleaf or hardwood trees, she says, sometimes using glyphosate, the main ingredient in the herbicide Roundup. Yet aggressive fire suppression that ramped up in the latter half of the 20th century has also led to what the researchers call a “fire deficit” in B.C., especially in forests and grasslands that are near communities with homes and infrastructure to protect.
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