Wildfire Causes and Management in Alberta Webinar Recording

In the wake of the Jasper wildfires that claimed 30% of the towns structures, it is more important than ever that we understand the factors affecting wildfire behaviour in Alberta in order to develop effective mitigation strategies. Come learn about "Alberta’s 2023 wildfires: context, factors and futures" with Professor Jen Beverly from the University of Alberta and Dave Schroeder from Alberta Forestry and Parks followed by a Q and A session.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Aysha: So thank you everyone so much for taking the time to join us today. I'm Aysha Wu. I'm the communications officer for the Alberta Land Institute and this is the first webinar in our lunchtime webinar series. The institute aims to connect research and policy for better land management of Alberta's changing landscape. So the goal of these webinars is to encourage knowledge sharing. And discussion out about a variety of land use topics relevant to Alberta and beyond. 

When speaking about land use, it's important to acknowledge that the University of Alberta is located on Treaty 6 territory and respects the histories, languages, and cultures of First Nations, Métis, Inuit and all first peoples of Canada, whose presence continues to enrich our vibrant community. 

I'm going to pass it off to today's moderator. Sandeep Agrawal, Sandeep is the director of the Alberta Land Institute and a Professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Alberta. So go ahead, Sandeep. 

Sandeep: Thank you, Aysha. Thank you everyone for joining in today. Today's webinar topic is wildfire causes and management in Alberta, a conversation which is quite relevant following the events of the Jasper wildfire. Today we have two presenters, Jen Beverly and Dave Schroeder. Both of them have long CV’s, so I'm going to do quick introductions for them. 

Jen Beverly is an associate professor at the University of Alberta and she's in the Faculty of Agricultural Life and Environmental Science in the Department of Renewable Resources. She holds MSc PhD degrees from the University of Toronto. Her research team currently focuses on various aspects of wildfire risk assessment, with the overarching goal of providing decision makers with the tools to ensure social and ecological systems thrive in fire prone environments. 

One other thing I wanted to say, Jen, is a fire behavior specialist, a former Helitack crew leader, which is, I believe, something to do with Ontario fire ranger, and she has worked with the federal government as well as a research scientist. So welcome, Jen. 

Dave. Dave Schroeder is the capability development and analysis program lead at Alberta Forestry and Parks, and he holds a masters degree in forestry from Lakehead University. Dave's role at Alberta Forestry and Parks is multifaceted. He's involved in a number of things. I will not go through all of them, but he manages science and technology research grants, coordinate support for research projects, focusing on fire smart and data support. He works with entrepreneurs to make sure that they have new tools and services to enhance wildfire management, and they've also provides wildfire fire operation support as a fire behavior analyst forecasting wildfire direction, timing and intensity, so he is right there with what the topic is today. 

So we'll start off with their presentations from Jane and Dave and then we'll open up for questions and answers. So please keep adding your questions as they as you think of them throughout the presentation. Aysha will compile them and then will talk about them at the end of the presentation. So at this point I hand it over to Jen. 

Jen: Thank you so much for the introduction and it's really great to be here. Thank you for the invitation to to spend a little bit of time with you talking about Alberta's wildfires. And I'm going to jump right into it and give you a bit of background about where this presentation started. 

So at the end of the fire season last year, it was a remarkable season across Canada and these are just some images that I had grabbed throughout the season posted to the media– social media from different parts of Canada. They were experiencing extreme wildfire situations impacting a lot of, quite a few communities right across the country. And at the end of the season, the editors of the Canadian Journal of Forest Research decided to invite researchers in different regions of the country to do a perspective papers on each of their regions. And I was asked to do it for Alberta, and I decided it would be great to have an operational– pair my research perspective with an operational perspective and invited my long time collaborator, Dave Schroeder at Alberta Wildfire to bring that operational side to the perspective piece that we prepared over the winter. And it's out now and you can see it. 

Other regions were also invited. So Lori Daniels at UBC was invited to do a prospective paper for British Columbia and Yan Boulanger for Quebec. And then some researchers in the Maritimes as well did one. And it's kind of interesting that the four papers are now out. They're gonna be part of a special issue. I encourage you to take a look at them. I'm gonna. 

I'm gonna share the stuff that I think is most interesting from our, Dave and my paper for Alberta, but I'm going to also glaze over a lot of stuff and if it catches your curiosity, then have a look at the paper. But it is kind of interesting that two of the papers, two of the four papers, went with just a very small authorship pairs and two went with, you know, 16 authors, 20 authors. I don't know how they do it, how they get 20 people to coalesce around a single perspective, but to their credit, I think that's a really kind of interesting contrast in the way these papers were done. 

But let's look at the data, and this was really a project about looking at the data. And there's a lot of narratives out there, especially because fire makes for such a great news story. The media is rampant whenever there's a, you know, especially a community that's threatened and it does become some kind, sometimes a little bit unsettling, almost entertainment. But it is well documented in the media and there, you start to hear a lot of ingrained narratives as part of that media coverage. And one of them that we hear a lot these days when it comes to fire just about anywhere is well we've never seen anything like this. In the sense that we're entered an era that's just nothing like what came before. 

And, you know, the data is, unfortunately, quite limited record keeping. You know we only have about 100 years, and I show the early years in grey because it's not that reliable. And when it comes to numbers of fires, the graphs on the bottom, those are particularly dubious because the way they've been recorded through time has changed. And, you know, you've gone through a period where maybe very small fires are not counted and then they are counted. So whether the numbers of fires are not that helpful, but they don't fluctuate quite as much. It's really all about the burned areas and how much burns every year and this is a key measure that's long been used to understand fire season severity and to sort of rate or sum up what's going on. And we do focus a lot on it and I did in this graph and many of the ones that will follow. 

It's– we're looking at the areas that burned here. Okay? And if you look at the data, I mean it's pretty astounding that 2023 is just not like anything that came before it's, you know, it's an outlier, but there are clear spikes in the data in prior years. There's always this sort of intermittent pattern. You've got a big spike, in 1981 is an example of that, and not much fire before or after. In fact, if you look at the 20 years before 1981, and we're saying, well, what's the annual average burned area every year in that 20 years compared with 1981, 1981 was, you know, a massive amplification, fifteen times the annual average area burned in the previous two decades. If you look at 2023, it's only actually 12 times the annual average burned in the preceding 2 decades. So there's this relative comparison that you can make. If you were back in 1981, the fire management organization at that time would have been experiencing something that was just as bad and on a relative basis compared to what status quo had been, what operations had been. 

And so these data are difficult because they do fluctuate so dramatically from year to year. And you also see through time these– and we don't have that much data– but you can see there's sort of periods of more or less fire activity. Here's another two years I want to draw your attention to. So 1980 and then 2016, both kind of similar moderate kind of years, but there are two fires that happened in those two years: the 1980 fire that I'm sure you've never heard of, but then the Horse River fire in Fort McMurray that most of us have heard of. About 100 kilometers apart and you know, one played out in obscurity decades ago and the other, you know, went down in history as one of the biggest natural disasters in Canadian history. And then there's some other notable fires there off the on the other side of the province. The Donny Creek Fire actually in BC that was of note last year, that was the biggest fire in BC history and and right next to it that that label #2, that's the Chinchaga Fire from 1950, and it doesn't count as the biggest fire in BC's history because it burned into Alberta. So the record splits it in half when they count up the area. But really, you know Donny Creek doesn't look that impressive compared to the Chinchaga Fire back in 1950. Why am I showing you these 4 fires? Just to hit home that you know, historically we've always had big fires in Alberta and in Western Canada. The kind of fires that we actually experienced last year weren't that different in terms of the characteristics, but there are some key differences that we did find. 

So this is kind of an updated map showing you all the mapped burned areas in the province of Alberta, going back to the 1930s and fire protection area as shown in kind of a grey outline. And that's really where all the fire records are because that's the area that the provincial government has jurisdiction to manage wildfire. So. When you look at that provincial forest area, most of the forests in the province are located in the Forest Protection area, 86 per cent of them. And if you look at how much of that area burned over the, roughly the last century, 18.7 million hectares. And so those are all those shaded areas. And then the 2023 ones as well, and that's actually 85 per cent of the current forest area in the fire protection area. 

Now one of the recurring narratives you also hear in the media that fire exclusion and fuel buildup is causing bigger, more intense fires. I haven't seen that in the data. And when we looked at the data, I've yet to see any evidence of that. What we did see is that there were big fires in 2023. They were very typical, though they were very consistent with big fires that we've had historically in the province, in terms of their sizes, rates of spread intensity, fire behavior, associated weather. They weren't really unique when you looked at them individually. What made them unique is that there were just so many of them. There were far more big fires, and by that I'm talking about 10,000 hectares or more, far more of those fires in 2023 than previously. 

And so we decided to look at the pattern of those big fires and these are the top 10 most severe fire years in Alberta just looking at it over the duration of the season, going from the start of May at day of the year 122 through to mid-September at day of the year 258. And each one of these bars are showing you on each of those days the number of large fires that were ignited on those days. And what you can see is that there's some outbreak years, and there's three of them: 1998, there was 9 of those big fires that occurred over 9 days; 2015, 14 over 7 days; and then here, 2023, 16 of those large fires in just 7 days right at the start of May. So those outbreak years though, those are the only three if you go back 40 years where you have that real condensed outbreak of large fire activity. 

More commonly when you're looking at fire seasons, severe fire seasons in Alberta, what you're seeing are more intermittent pattern, just a few or one large fires are ignited and then a couple of days where there's nothing going on and maybe some more and it's kind of an intermittent pattern. And there was that pattern as well in 2023. And this was kind of what we found. There's these two patterns in one fire season and from what we could see, it's the first time that's happened where we had this outbreak, all these large fires all at once in a very condensed time period that happened in May. But then we had the intermittent pattern as well, so kind of multimodal. And so we really started to focus on those large fires. There were 36 of them in total in 2023 and they started to– when we looked at them spatially, we could see there's another pattern there. It's not just this temporal split. Those early May fires were predominantly in the south and south central western portion of the province here in the black, labeled in black. And then further to the north, those were the later fires that were intermittently throughout the rest of the season. 

So we had these two different kind of groups and those are the early season fires right there. And the curious thing about those fires is that they were started by lightning, and this is really, really, really unusual. So if you look at it, and this is compiling the data going back to 1983 and the top graph here, the yellow bars are showing you the frequencies of lightning fires counts on each day of the year and the shaded area is that start of May, May 1 to 15. And in 2023, we had this unusual spike of lightning activity in early May. Now normally only about 3 per cent of lightning fires happen in May and very few at the very start of the month. So this was really, really unusual. So you know that that made us look at well, is there some trend in increasing lightning and early in in the spring? 

So this bottom graph is showing you that, and actually there isn't. There's only really two years of note where there's been substantive lightning in early May: last year and then 1993. But 1993 wasn't even a bad fire year, so they had the lightning, but nothing much happened. So what we saw is something really, really unusual last year. Lightning started a lot of big fires in early May. And if you look at how effective it was in this graph here, what we did is we selected out, okay, there's all the lightning starts in this sort of lightning fire zone in early May. And we also, then, looked at the fire started during that same area and time period for all other causes. And what we could see is that lightning was way more effective at starting big fires. So lightning started 13 large fires out of 71 lightning small lightning fires that were detected. Whereas when you look at fires from all other causes, there were only two large fires ignited. So lighting is really, really good at starting big spring fires and I'm sure that's a narrative that you haven't heard and the media wasn't really talking about last year at all because we didn't know that yet. 

But this is the single most unique thing about last year is that we had early season lightning fires and there were no constraints on those fires, which meant things hadn't greened up yet. And that would normally occur when you have lightning and June, July and August under normal conditions. Usually it's green when that lightning starts, and so those lightning ignitions are not as effective. Without green-up they were very, very effective at starting big fires. Lightning is also synchronous, happens all at once. People, who usually are responsible for fires in the spring, they don't get together and all start fires at the same time. When you get a big burst of lightning, that can quickly overwhelm resources. And then lightning is also starting fires in places that are tough to get to. 

Alright. So what were the contributing factors? So this was a kind of a perfect storm. It wasn't just the lightning. We know that climate heating, drought, longer fire seasons, more hot, dry, windy days, more opportunities for fires to grow to those large sizes, all of that had to be there when lightning occurred and we got those starts. The fire weather and the fuel moisture was very conducive. There was, there's– and we go into this in the paper documenting sort of the evidence of how last year's weather was just a little bit different, atypical. There were synoptic weather patterns that were very conducive to these extended periods of warm, dry conditions due to upper atmospheric blocking ridges. And we also had both a positive phase El Niño and so, as well as a positive phase Atlantic multidecadal oscillation, which are both associated with large fires and extreme fire activity. And finally, when you put all of this together and overwhelm resources and you've got fire happening across the country as a whole, putting strain on shared resources, that meant that a lot of fires were left to burn and portions of fires just simply weren't suppressed. 

Okay, so I think I'm at my 15 minute mark. I'm just going to quickly highlight a couple of of questions about the future and we can get into that more after Dave presents his slides. But one of the things I wanted to note, that if we had not had those early season lightning fires, then the 2023 burned area would have been on par with 1981. The graph would have looked different. It would have been a bad year, but it would not have been this extreme amplification that we saw. And I'm going to, maybe, I'll leave these points for next steps or what we can do to follow up with on Dave's presentation. 

Dave: OK, great. Yes, thanks, Jen. And it was good to see a diverse audience that signed up, so we thought that it would be valuable to also give a bit of an overview about how Alberta Forestry and Parks manages wildfire. And so I'll do a few slides just to talk about that at a very introductory level, and then we'll talk a little bit about how the 2023 fire season impacted our resources that Jen mentioned became acutely short in supply very quickly. So here we go.

Very, very broadly there, fire management can be divided into two general functions: prevention and then operational response, preparation and response. So on the prevention side we have the three E’s of prevention, engineering, education and enforcement. And from the engineering side, I've got a picture here of the fire smart graphic showing in this case a home and the different zones that homeowners can as a reference for reducing the risk on their own properties. So engineering is dominated by doing what we call fuel management or reducing the fire danger or the risk for vegetation. So we remove or displace vegetation that may be flammable in and around communities, but there are other components to engineering as well and the FireSmart Alberta website also talks about the six other disciplines of FireSmart, which are equally important for reducing risk. 

And then moving on to education and enforcement. So our, the Forestry and Parks has divided the area of responsibility in Alberta to what we call the Green Zone or the Forest Protection area. And there are 10 forest management areas, and each of those areas will have programs staff that are involved with working with industry and the public to reduce the potential for human caused ignition. So they go to trade shows and local events to work with the public. And so the picture there shows a slide from the brochure addressing the potential for off highway vehicles to accidentally cause fires. And then on the right, we manage an extensive fire ban program that is in place to help residents and industry be able to enjoy fires and use fires for debris disposal, but also restrict those when fire danger is high. So that that information is available on the website. So those are two examples of the education and enforcement programs that comprise a much broader prevention program.

And then moving on to wildfire operations support there are ahead of responding to fires. There's what I call here, anticipation and preparation. So anticipation is forecasting. We have staff for a meteorological section that provides daily weather briefings, and we have fire behavior analysts like myself, who then use that weather and the vegetation information to provide forecasts. And then we also have folks that are looking out at what kind of resources we need both internally, within Alberta, and then externally, as import resources from across Canada and around the world. So based on the weather and the potential fire behavior, a big part of our operational response is to pre-position resources so that we can respond as quickly as possible. So our initial attack program is very comprehensive and that's because, you know, the resources in Alberta are fully allocated. There's industrial use across the whole province so responding quickly to fires has been shown to be the most effective way to keep costs as low as possible and to protect values. So the pre-positioning is based on the fire behavior, lightning forecasts and values and that means moving crews around, moving aircraft around to be able to respond as quickly as possible. 

And then we, also included in that, have a detection program that still includes 100 human occupied lookouts. This is, I think actually the – I don't know of any other agency around the world that still maintains an extensive lookout program like this with humans, but we found through some testing that they are still very effective, especially for the boreal forest. And we also have a program of patrols, both aerially and on the ground. And then a lot of our detection reports come from what we call unplanned– so it's members of the public and industry who detect fires and call them in through our 310 by your hotline. 

And then once fires have been detected, there is the initial attack. And as I mentioned, rapid initial attack with sufficient resources is a really most effective way of preventing more fires than we get from growing and our success rate for initial attack is very often in 90 to 95 per cent. So that response can be by ground or air base crews. It can involve air tankers, and Alberta has a very large and diverse fleet of aircraft. And there may also be an assessor. So when Jen mentioned that when the number of fires becomes overwhelming, that there isn't a crew or aircraft available to attack every fire, then we have experienced assessors who will fly out on the landscape and provide direction for which crew fires should take priority for resources. 

And then if a fire escapes initial attack, which means it hasn't been contained by the 1st 24 hour period, then wildfire analysis and strategy is developed to provide options for different sustained attack approaches. And again, this depends on the number of fires values at risk and is informed by resource availability and wildfire management plans, which is a tool that Alberta has been developing over the last 10 plus years. And so these are also somewhat unique I think to Alberta, at least within Canada, where we have specific plans that address wildfire management both from a prevention perspective and then to support operational decision making. And then fires that escape initial attack require a sustained attack program and that, depending on the fire, and it will require an incident management team which may be up to 20 people. And those are long term, so weeks or more. Sometimes the fires, especially last year, they lasted months. 

And so you have to have incident management teams that can cycle in and how to manage the fire and specifically all the resources that are being deployed on that fire. So resource availability is a big factor. And the slide here just shows the resource import and export total. So all the Canadian agencies fund a not for profit group called the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center that coordinates sharing of resources across Canada, and it's a very effective system. And so we, Alberta, shares resources as it can as shown in orange. Even during busy years, we'll send resources out during the quiet part time of the year and then we bring in a lot of resources as well.

So just like the number of fires last year was exceptional, so too were the number of imported resources, over 4000. And what was interesting last year was that you know, because everybody in Canada was busy and also competing for imported resources, we ended up bringing in firefighters from Latin America and South America, countries that we'd never engaged with before. We have folks coming from the southern hemisphere, from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. And so it's really a global effort to help manage these fires. And even though this shows how many resources we brought in, they weren't enough to be able to put the desired amount of firefighters on the fire. And it's, as you can imagine, it's challenging bringing in several a couple of 100 by the fighters from South Africa. It takes a bit of planning and time, so you have to be able to look out several weeks or a month ahead. And just a point there too, that last year the United States was fairly quiet and they really helped us out by sending up a lot of folks and this year they were busy. And so that was a resource or a source of firefighters that wasn't available to us. So we have to think about fire trends globally and how does that impact our ability to get resources as well. And not only that, the cost of bringing these folks in is substantial. 

So a couple of trends that you know, these are a little bit my own observations, but I think you see those when you look at the news and patterns across the planet, really. At the top, the weather and forecast and compared to even a few decades ago, our weather forecasts are vastly superior but still, you know, limited to only a few days out when they can be reliable and there's no, you know, there's very little reliability in a seasonal forecast. So like I mentioned, when you're trying to plan for resources that you might need for the next six weeks, that's very challenging and it can be a little bit frustrating. You know, a colleague of mine who came from Australia this year and got to a fire right after it rained and then, you know, they still needed people there to manage the resources and put out the fire. But as the fire behavior analyst, I don't think he saw any open flames this time around. 

Another big emphasis is on technology development, so the use of drones is very much in the news and very much in the mindset of folks to enable improved response and improved suppression capability in Alberta. We've adopted night vision and helitankers so they can work at night and that's usually when fires are quieter. So that's been a great addition to our arsenal of tools. But really, technology is incremental and for every night vision equipped helitanker that really provides benefits, there are other technologies that provide very small incremental improvements. And so you know, this has to be a long term vision that technology is going to enable us to be more effective with suppression and prevention as well. 

There's vegetation pattern changes so without intervention and more fire we might expect to see fewer conifer forests and more grassland and deciduous. Now this is without any intervention in management and just based on model outputs, but it is a potential future. And so my colleagues in forest management are also looking at this from a perspective of maintaining healthy forests and fiber for forest industry. 

The health impacts to firefighters is also increasing in awareness. It's been in the news now a number of times about concerns about health impacts, both physically and mentally. And those are increasing both through more awareness, but also the nature of firefighting has become more challenging. And so the final bullet is no surprise to anyone, that complexity and costs of managing fires is increasing and how can we keep up with the pattern of increasing fire load? 

So my final slide here, I just have a few parting questions that I think are important for society as a whole to think about, and us as forest and land managers. Twenty twenty three, as Jen showed, there was no precedent in recent history but can we estimate that might happen again, and in what timeline? And what is the likelihood of a transformational technology change, something that decreased costs and complexity? You think of the, if the transistor was invented in the 1940s, it really became useful in products in the 60s, and now we're virtually dependent on it. So that's a long timeline when you think about technological transformation. And so should we depend on somebody to invent something that's going to save our day? We shouldn't. But we also shouldn't back off from continuing to invest in the potential for technology to help us out. And can we manage vegetation differently at broad scales, something that we haven't really had to think about in North America, but are starting to. And really globally, will the increasing wildfire activity continue to outstrip our ability to achieve desired outcomes, which are to prevent loss to human values and to maintain healthy forests that provide economic and ecological benefits? 

So that's a very open-ended philosophical question, but it's something that I suppose is the reason people signed up to take in this presentation. So that's the end of my slide and. I guess I'll pass it back to. Sandeep. 

Sandeep: Thank you, Dave, thank you, Jen, for your wonderful presentations. There are a lot of food for thought. Dave’s last slide had a lot of questions for us to ponder about. So at this stage we'll move on to the questions and answers period. I see we have 15 minutes, so we can take, certainly take a few questions. So this is for the audience, if you’d like to ask a question, you can type it in in the chat box or if you're eager to just orally say your question, then raise your hand with one of the symbols at the bottom of your screen. But when you do so, please identify yourself and your organization and keep your question brief and direct. 

So while the questions are coming in the chat or someone to raise their hand, there are a couple of questions that I have, Jen and Dave. One is this, if you go back to very recent fire, the Jasper fire, and I'm not I’m not a fire expert, but the studies have shown that there used to be a lot of fires in the Jasper area. Fires were quite large and frequent until that whole area was turned into a National Park, that is in 1930 or so, and Parks Canada began to suppress fires using suppressants and what have you. So I just wanted to hear thoughts like about the factors that led to the fire that recently happened in Jasper, so any one of you can take the lead. 

Dave: Sure. So, an interesting point to not only Parks Canada and every agency in North America. It wasn't just suppressing fire, but also excluding fire. And by that I mean it's very well documented that most First Nations groups or bands used fire as a form of land management, and virtually across North America. So the incidence of lightning caused fires is very infrequent in the mountains, and we know that from the weather, the evidence that we have. But there's also a lot of evidence that there is a lot of, has been a lot of fire in those regions and that lines up with the oral history of many First Nations groups, that they used fire and it was a very important part of their culture. So that landscape change with fire exclusion has resulted in an increase in forest cover in parts of the world, or in that part of – many parts of North America, really, and that the Mountain Legacy Photo series really illustrate that dramatically. 

And so you have an increase in forest cover, and in Jasper there was very extensive pine beetle killed, so there was, you know, that adds to the flammability of forest. And really, Jen alluded to this too, we have a very short history of understanding the fire, the vegetation and fire cycles in that part of the world. So I think in a longer picture, that kind of fire may not have been as unusual, but if the vegetation was managed differently on a very large scale, then the likelihood of a fire like that would also be reduced. 

Sandeep: Thanks for that, Dave. So there are a few questions in the chat box. So one, this question is for you, Jen I think. This goes back to your second slide if I recall and Fiona, I'm sort of taking her question and posing it back to you. There were no papers for the Northwest Territories or Yukon, and she's wondering why was the case? 

Jen: Yeah, it's a good question and it's probably one for the co-editors the CJFR. Yeah I'm not sure why they chose the four regions that they did. Most likely because those were where large impacts occurred, especially to communities, I suspect. But yeah, that's there may just not have been a critical mass to do a paper for the Territories. 

Sandeep: Thanks Jen. This question I think is more about FireSmart program, so perhaps it's for you, Dave. I'm not, and I think the two are connected, so I'm gonna pose both of them to you. So Dawn Macdonald says I'm assuming that the FireSmart program is meant to have your property in a state that the fire could go around the items of value on your property. And there's a question mark. So yeah, I think there's a question there. And the second, Maddie Safari says, I would like to know what government or other organizations can do to prevent fires. So 2 questions for you, Dave. 

Dave: Sure. Yeah, the FireSmart program emphasizes vegetation management, but also changing or modifying the building materials to limit the potential for a structure to ignite. So in a sense, having the fire go around is a very good statement because one of the very most challenging things about fires are the flying embers that they produce. So, and we've seen this in the multiple wildland-urban interfaces in events that happen where it's often buildings or structures on the inside of the community that ignite first, because of the long distance embers. So it's the ability for your property to withstand the fire going around it, but also to limit the possibility for an ember to land and ignite something. So if you imagine any place that leaves and dust accumulate, that's where embers are going to land. So it's almost like there's a signal to tell you where you should pay attention to your own property. 

And then, for government or other organizations to do to prevent fires, so the FireSmart Alberta and FireSmart Canada are very much about resiliency toward fires and then our own program, as I mentioned, we have the forest areas and staff dedicated towards the prevention program that work with the public to encourage awareness of the, you know, the the risk that outdoor activities can produce. So public education is a never ending program to limit people and to educate them about the risks that fire can have. And you know, just like I had shown the slide, just driving an ATV around and not paying attention to what you're driving through and the temperature of the exhaust has resulted in fairly substantial wildfires. 

Sandeep: Thanks, Dave. Here's another question. This is from Nicole Bonnett from the U of A, and she says that generally people say there are more frequent wildfires, happening more intensity we see in the wildfire. 

But the talk and I'm thinking mostly from Jen. Shows that the fires may not be occurring that frequently, but the land burnt is larger. So she wants some clarification on that, Jen. 

Jen: Yeah, it's great you guys ask great questions and I think this also relates to the the last comment there, Dave, Dave's comment as well. It's a really tough issue, right? And you hear it repeatedly, okay, that the fires are bigger, they're more intense. We've never seen anything like this, right? That's the narrative. And that may be true because it hasn't happened for that individual in that region in the last 20 years and they're experience there. But when, again, when we look at the data, what we see are the kinds of fires that we have and that we had last year individually, they don't look that different than the other fires in the historical record when we look at extreme years. You know the Chinchaga Fire back in 1950, or that 1980 fire that's just as big as the Fort McMurray Fire. So these big, intense fires are really normal in these ecosystems. And, you know, one of the examples I give as well, if you have an ecosystem like the boreal, where the species that conifer species are really built to burn, I mean these there's no doubt that these species have evolved with fire. They require fire in order to regenerate and to initiate the next stand and to they're, you know, they're not fire resistant. They're got thin bark. They're all going to be killed by the fire. So they're stand replacing process in these ecosystems. So you've got this ecological process. It's natural. Works there and and the way these fires are are burned is intensely. So if you have a bonfire and you add some more fuel to it, you still have a bonfire. And so you can say, well, that standard maybe at 30 years is less fuel in it than it will at 80 years. It's still designed to burn as a crown fire, as a high intensity fire. 

There's other ecosystems, you know, and BC might be an example of that, ponderosa pine, douglas fir and eastern Canada, red and white pine. There's other ecosystems where you don't have high intensity crown fires as your natural fire, and it's a lot easier to disrupt those ecosystems by suppressing fire and getting that fuel build up and then having an unnatural fire. But in the boreal, I have not seen good evidence that there has been some kind of a shift in the landscape, mosaic and fuel loadings that's leading to unnatural fires in the boreal. The fires we're seeing in the boreal look, the way they've always looked. They're big and they burn intensely and they're spreading with rates of spread that we normally see and that have been documented. If you go back to the 80s or even the 60s or or as far back as we have records. So is fuel build up a thing in an ecosystem that it's an actual kind of an intense crown fire ecosystem? It's really hard to show that it's become an embedded sort of agreed narrative, but there's, I haven't seen any compelling data to actually show that. 

What we did see is that the fires themselves weren't that different, but there's more of the big fires, right? We definitely saw that in 2023, you know, those large, 10,000 plus hectare fires ignited by lightning early May. Typically that happens once per decade and last year there were 13 in one year alone, right? So if there's more opportunity for those fires to happen, you end up with more area burned, even if the fires themselves are doing their regular thing. 

Sandeep: Hmm. Okay. Makes sense Jen. So one other very quick question, and I know we are coming up to an hour here. So the question is, given the nature of big or mega fires and the danger of long distance embers, how useful are fire breaks? Maybe to Dave, yeah. 

Dave: They are useful. It's about risk reduction and just like, a dam has a certain capacity, and we're seeing flooding events that are exceeding the capacity of those of those things, so when you have these big events then, yes. When we're having more very intense fires than a fire break has more opportunities of being breached because there's more higher intensity fires. 

So it's simply a matter of risk reduction and a fire break is one tool that can be used for mitigation. And so it has to be combined with other management tools to become more effective. But yeah that's the challenge is nothing can guarantee that it will work in all conditions to stop fires. 

Sandeep: Thanks, Dave. So that was the last question I wanted to pose to you. So over to you, Aysha. 

Aysha: Great. Okay, well, that's 1:00. So we are going to wrap up here. Thank you for your time and expertise, Jen and Dave, and thank you for moderating, Sandeep. We will be holding more free lunch time webinar sessions, so keep an eye out for the next one. We'll announce it on our social media and website. There is a short survey at the end of the webinar for participants just asking for your feedback and suggestions. It's optional. You don't have to do it, but we would really appreciate the feedback. But thank you everyone for your time today and I really hope to see you at the next one.