Wildfire has always been here, and humans have always had a relationship with it. These days, we have recognized that our relationship to fire has been less than ideal. Wildfire smoke has consumed our summers, wildfire threat has persisted in our minds, and there seems to be no end in sight. So, how do we begin to change our relationship to fire? How do we go from surviving it, to thriving with it? The knowledge exists, the solutions are there, how do we make it happen? Transformational change is hard.

Resources

Lori Daniels

Sponsors

West Fraser

GreenLink Forestry Inc.

Quotes

23.23 - 23.34: “Trees are really amazing; trees will colonize till they establish and grow and persist in any space where the seedling can arrive and be given an opportunity to survive.”

Takeaways

The more awareness, the better (4.53)

Lori highlights the importance of fire safety awareness and training, since “almost half of the fires in Canada are started by people”.

The Centre for Wildfire Coexistence (10.34)

The Centre for Wildfire Coexistence at the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia looks at the recovery of ecosystems and communities in BC.

What tree rings tell us (12.54)

Lori’s research takes place at the Tree Ring Lab at UBC, processing samples from the forest to understand how historical fire regimes functioned across a range of ecosystems.

Historical fires (15.45)

Tree rings provide some quantitative metrics that demonstrate Indigenous knowledge of the fire intervals and their impacts on the ecosystems where the fires burned.

Viewing fire as bad (20.03)

Lori points out that European settlers made it illegal for Indigenous people to practice cultural burning, creating “an abrupt change in the way that fire functioned in the ecosystem”.

The fire deficit (21.49)

Lori shares that cultural burning maintains heterogeneity and variability of forests and diversity of ecosystems essential to maintaining biodiversity in BC.

The fire suppression paradox (26.21)

Reintroducing fire as proactive mitigation is important in forests where the fire regime has been disrupted and fuel has accumulated, putting communities and other values in danger.

Wildfire behaviour (27.58)

Lori lists three critical factors that control wildfire behaviour and effects - the interactions between weather and topography, the intensity of the fires, and the fuels.

A challenging situation (38.13)

Concerns about smoke stopped prescribed burns that provided the benefits of surface fires, leading to the accumulation of fuel and high-intensity fires.

Local capacity building (54.47)

Lori’s advice is to empower BC’s 154 municipalities, and 204 Indigenous communities through funding and education to execute their wildfire resilience plans.

Mitigation is like insurance (1.03.04)

Climate change dictates more such fires in the future, predicting rising costs of firefighting and medicines for the vulnerable, and damage to homes, farmlands, water supply and habitats.

Cognitive dissonance (1.19.34)

Lori hopes that the provincial legislature will understand the importance of contributing funds in order to make changes in policies and practices that will govern forest management.

Be fire smart (1.26.21)

Investing in fire-proofing one’s home and understanding how fuel treatments and prescribed burning can help are steps to take toward changing fire behaviour to reduce wildfire risk.

Win-win situation (1.33.26)

Some First Nations use the biomass they remove from the forests around their community to create heat energy that supports their medical center and offices.

Nature knows best…right? So, our forest management strategies should try to emulate nature? That’s what we used to think. Unfortunately, our ideas on how to emulate natural disturbance rarely result in something that acts like a natural disturbance. Bottom line, we are not fire, and we want different things from fire, so we need to not act like fire. We have had some good ideas, and our minds were in the right place, but it is now time to shake things up. Let’s put that big head of ours to use and come up with something that would make mother nature proud.

Resources

Ellen Macdonald

Sponsors

West Fraser

GreenLink Forestry Inc.

Quotes

43.23 - 43.32: “The more complex and variable and flexible you make regulations, the more difficult it is to go and see if people are following them or not.”

Takeaways

Sustainable forest management (10.46)

Ellen concurs with the widely held definition of sustainable forest management as “managing our forests in a way that sustains the full diversity of values they have”. This differs from the old definition of sustained yield forestry which focused on sustaining timber production.

Emulation of natural disturbances (15.31)

Ellen talks about the origin of sustainable forest management in the 1980s-90s motivated by a desire to sustain a full range of values and inspired by natural disturbance patterns. Ellen believes the emulation of natural disturbances is one tool to achieve ecosystem management goals.

Nature knows best (19.23)

Ellen points out that using natural forest ecology to inform forest management goes back to the 1920s-30s when nature was used as an inspiration to understand how forests functioned and regenerated after disturbances depending on the species there to inform silviculture practices.

Identifying the real objective (28.12)

The important differentiator of natural disturbance, whether fire, insects or major disturbances is that “they don’t kill everything”. They create opportunities for trees to regenerate and create structural diversity in the forest. The focus should be on forest management plans purposefully emulating the effects of natural disturbance instead of the patterns of natural disturbance.

Challenges in sustainable forest management (43.00)

Ellen finds that the complexity of implementing regulations related to sustainable forest management is a challenge. There are also worries that some may take advantage of the flexibilities in the regulation or make mistakes in interpreting how natural disturbance effects should be emulated since it is not a well-tested hypothesis. Additionally, forests take a long time to grow, so it will be a slow process.

The old and the new (51.17)

Ellen uses the example of deadwood to explain how the understanding of different components of a forest evolves over time. Different technologies today can help us monitor, document and inventory forest biodiversity which allows for more opportunities to manage forests better.

Always learning (1.07.08)

Ellen advises learning from Indigenous peoples’ history with landscape management and the tools they use. She hopes “forest management can be viewed like science - as a never-ending set of questions rather than a series of disconnected truths”.

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Image curtesy of National Geographic and Eye of Science through Sue Grayston

In forest management, we spend a lot of time on the things we can see; charismatic megafauna, trees, pests and plants. But what about the things we can’t see? What if I told you there was an entirely unexplored ecosystem below our feet? One that has more biodiversity than we can imagine. This community is responsible for half of the carbon sequestration of the forest, and the maintenance of ecosystem function for above ground species. This life beneath our feet is as much responsible for the forests we love as the biggest trees and the cutest caribou. Let’s show it some love. 

Resources

Continuous root forestry—Living roots sustain the belowground ecosystem and soil carbon in managed forests

Sponsors

West Fraser

GreenLink Forestry Inc.

Takeaways

New frontiers (10.17)

Cindy highlights that they found archaea populations in forest soil, a different type of organism which can also carry out nitrification of the soil.

Unseen but important (14.41)

Cindy shares that it is difficult to advocate for the importance and inclusion in forest management of organisms that can’t be seen.

A whole world in a spoon of soil (19.52)

Next-generation sequencing techniques help us understand the workings of organisms in the soil.

Microbial processes (24.51)

Sue describes the labelling techniques through which they label trees with heavy isotopes of carbon sources similar to the carbon from trees, allowing them to identify groups of organisms that are important in using that carbon.

Saving the world (30.20)

Sue spotlights the fact that many organisms spend all or some of their lives in the soil creating a link between organisms above and below. Forest soil microbes remove methane and nitrous oxide from the atmosphere and clean water waste.

Knowledge is power (34.41)

Cindy believes that understanding the workings of soil organisms is better than using chemicals for biological controls. Microbes process organic matter and help lock it into the soil.

How forest harvest affects microbial communities (48.40)

Sue found that dispersed retention in clear cuts has a better function in retaining microbial diversity and its functioning across the cut block. Cindy adds that mycorrhizal fungi communities depend on the dynamic flux created by trees.

Below-ground diversity leads to a resilient ecosystem (56.32)

Every plant species has its temperature range of comfort which is being affected due to climate change. Recent wildfires have also been devastating for the soil biome.

Inoculant seed zones (1.06.59)

Sue and Cindy talk about how unaffected forests can act as seed zones after a wildfire. Nitrogen fixers prevent the soil from declining if there is a wildfire again.

What’s below is as important as what’s above ground (1.22.33)

Cindy offers a different way of thinking about forest management - that sites can not only be saved but also improved using the understanding of below-ground ecosystems. She laments the lack of care with which soil is currently viewed.

Stand and landscape level diversity (1.36.21)

When there is a diversity of tree and plant species, there will also be below-ground diversity. Built into that maintenance of stand productivity is using improved genetic stocks that are programmed to grow faster as well as silviculture techniques.

Ongoing monitoring (1.41.45)

Cindy talks about the need to monitor soil biodiversity and measure key processes and the amount of soil organic matter, especially mineral-associated organic matter. She reinforces the need to develop resilient forests, and the first step would be to update forestry policies.