Fire risk reduction in the Coastal Douglas-fir biogeoclimatic zone
Introducing a new practitioner’s report focused on reducing fire risk by increasing ecological integrity.
Historically, wildfire has been an intermittent but essential disturbance regime in forested ecosystems across the country. In more recent times, the arrival of settlers and the dominance of Eurocentric resource management philosophy has led to Indigenous land alienation, fire suppression, and massive ecological disturbance and fragmentation, which together have drastically altered the way fire behaves on the landscape. Meanwhile, drought, reduced snowpack, and extreme “once-in-a-lifetime” weather events, along with other climate change consequences, have exacerbated the risk that ignitions become catastrophic, landscape-consuming conflagrations.
The danger of climate change has, perhaps, never been more apparent to those who call Turtle Island home than right now. Nearly 5 million hectares of forest burned before the first day of summer in 2023, amounting to more land area consumed during the entire “unprecedented” fire seasons of 2016, 2019, 2020, and 2022 combined. Though federal, provincial, and even local governments are working to address fire risk, particularly in communities with a high wildland-urban interface (WUI), one-size-fits-all is not always the most effective approach.
How local organizations are working to address the problem
To date, less work has been done to understand and manage fire risk in the Coastal Douglas-fir (CDF) zone compared to other areas in British Columbia. Further, local fire departments, conservancy associations, and other organizations/agencies operating in the CDF zone are often prevented from working together on region-wide issues by the island geography that quite literally confines them into silos. Yet, collaborative effort is sorely needed. Many of the second and third-growth forests that have regenerated post-industrial cut in the CDF are overly dense, single-aged, and species-poor. In addition to limiting the biodiversity these forests are able to support, this structure makes them more vulnerable to fire, particularly as the frequency and severity of summer drought driven by climate change continues to intensify.
In response to these challenges, a community of practice made up of a diverse group of experts has assembled under Transition Salt Spring’s leadership. This began with the establishment of the Maxwell Lake Watershed Project in early 2021, which has since been absorbed under the umbrella of the larger Climate Adaptation Research Lab (CARL) project. In February 2023, TSS’ CARL project team organized and hosted a virtual gathering of practitioners including foresters, firefighters, and scientists, to explore how wildfire risk can be reduced and climate resilience increased via the enhancement of ecological integrity. This was followed by an in-person debrief on Salt Spring Island a few days later. Findings from those assemblies and the planning discussions that preceded them have been synthesized into an actionable practitioners’ report.
The report
The resulting report was circulated to all workshop presenters for feedback before being finalized and submitted to project funders in the spring of 2023. In September, the report was presented to the Salt Spring Island Local Trust Committee to inform local land use planning and future directions for reducing wildfire risk and enhancing ecological integrity.
Though the current iteration of the report is intended to be applicable and actionable, it is expected that report findings will evolve as the local community of practice continues to study, refine, and strengthen strategies to address wildfire risk in the CDF zone. Already, since the most current version of the report was finalized, the standard FireSmart zone of influence was reduced from 100 metres to 30 metres based on the best available science. Such changes are important to document and disseminate to ensure the most up-to-date science is available to inform decisions that keep ecological and human communities safe while also restoring biodiversity to the coastal forests of the region.