Wildfires causing Canada's forests to dry out, experts at conference say
As Canada faces longer, more intense wildfire seasons, forestry scientists meeting in Thunder Bay this week say the country's forests are drying out faster than ever, and that could transform how we manage them in the decades to come.
At the Canadian Institute of Forestry's 117th annual conference, hundreds of forest professionals, researchers, Indigenous leaders and policymakers gathered to discuss the pressures of climate change.
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Among the most urgent topics is how heat and drought are changing forest moisture and fuel levels, the materials that feed wildfires.
"Modest increases in temperature result in very significant reductions in fuel moisture, which makes those fuels, these trees, these shrubs, these downed trees, this dead wood, all of it that much more flammable," said Patrick James, associate professor at the University of Toronto researching forest disturbances and wildfires.
Associate Professor Patrick James is a scientists in the Daniels Faculty's forestry department at the University of Toronto. (Courtesy: University of Toronto)
James said even slight warming trends are creating cascading effects, drying out vegetation and dead wood, and making forests more vulnerable to fast-spreading fires
"As we get more fires that are more severe, there's a very high risk that we will overwhelm the resilience mechanisms," explained James. "We will overwhelm these resilience mechanisms, and the forest will not regenerate in the future. And so we might end up having less fire in the future," explained James.
But James said the possibility of having fewer fires in the future is not necessarily a good thing. He says fires are actually a normal, necessary part of how those ecosystems work and stay healthy.
He took part in a panel which examined how shifting weather patterns could both challenge and, in some rare cases, benefit certain ecosystems.
"In some places where moisture is limited, the upcoming decades will be good for forest growth," said Amy Wotherspoon, a research scientist with the University of British Columbia's research program, the Silva21 project. "By comparison, where it's going to get hotter and drier and a moisture-limited climate, that's going to be very bad for forest growth."
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Those changes, she said, will require experts to rethink how Canada manages its forests — from how trees are planted and harvested to how communities prepare for fire. Wotherspoon said adaptive silviculture can improve the resistance and the resilience of Canadian forests and communities that depend on them.
"Whereas in the past, a lot of our forest management plans and silvicultural treatments were based on one goal of harvest volume and timber value, now we are realizing that we can't play that game anymore. We need to adapt to our surroundings and to climate change and how our environment is changing," Wotherspoon explained.
Simply, adaptive silviculture means studying how forests are changing, trying out new methods and adjusting the plan over time to make forests stronger and more resilient during climate change.
According to environmental group Greenpeace, Canada's boreal forest alone stores billions of tonnes of carbon, and its degradation could have global climate impacts. James said that understanding how fire interacts with forest fuels is now critical to both climate adaptation and national resilience.
Amy Wotherspoon is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Forest Resources Management in the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia and a part of the Silva21 project, funded by the NSERC Alliance Grant Research Program. That is a research program aims to provide data, tools and practical solutions to improve the resilience of Canadian forests. (Courtesy: Amy Wotherspoon)
"In terms of policy and management, think methods for effective fuel mitigation, identifying areas that have high amounts of fuel that are at high risk could be prioritized for removal," said James, explaining that it is important to reduce wildfire risk before fires even start.
The conference continues until October 8, with sessions focusing on Indigenous forest stewardship, biodiversity and strategies to build more resilient forest systems across the country.
"Canada was built on forestry," James said. "Having this chance to have conversations with people living and working in the forest, studying the forest from all these different perspectives, only I think everyone goes back enriched with an understanding of this larger endeavour that we are all a part of."
Thumbnail courtesy of Integrity Reforestation via CBC News.
The story was originally written by Rajpreet Sahota and published for CBC News.