By Adam Berls

forest management

Calls to rethink how we manage forests in B.C. after devastating wildfire season

Sep 1, 2023 | 11:20 AM

PRINCE GEORGE — The 2023 wildfire season is one for the record books. The most hectares burned on record, and also one of the earliest starts to the season. Questions are now being raised on what to do to prevent seasons like this one from happening again. A pair of words comes up often in this discussion and it is forest management.

“I think the argument has been very unproductive. It’s climate change or forest management. And actually the real thing is climate change is real. We’re getting worse and hotter summers. We need to change our forest management to adapt to climate change. And this might be a hot summer historically, but it’s going to be a cold summer when we look back at it in the future. I think that we absolutely have to change how we’re getting our timber in order to reduce the fire hazard. On the plus side, as you can see behind me, we’ve got a lot of very green, lush understory in here. That’s there’s evidence of moose browsing, deer browse all around us right now. So it’s not just about reducing the fire hazard, it’s about fighting for biodiversity.” – Liam Parfitt, Owner, Freya Logging Company

Liam explains that having more trees, does not necessarily keep moisture in the ground, especially in the drier months of the year.

“People get lost in the idea that when you have a whole bunch of trees that it holds the moisture in and there’s no there’s no sunlight on the forest floor. But the problem with that is each tree is a straw sucking water out of the soil and you have too many trees. They compete and they draw all of the moisture out of the soil. It’s as if you had four straws in a milkshake or two straws in a milkshake, the milkshake is going to last longer. And that leaves some moisture for this very, very diverse understory here. So there’s probably 20 species of plants in the understory within three meters of me, but there’s only four species in the overstory. We often get too caught up in what’s going on above us and not enough what’s going on below us.” – Liam Parfitt, Owner, Freya Logging Company

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Currently when you have a forest packed together with trees, with space in between them, it presents a crown fire hazard.

“A lot of the a lot of the provincial fire regulations looks too much at slash on the ground instead of looking at the crown fires because the crown fires are the ones that run, you know, they’ll run ten kilometers overnight. Ground fires might run 200 meters overnight because they’re burn in this very moist area below, there’s less trees that can out moisture. So we really need to focus on reducing the crown fire hazard by taking out some of the trees. We definitely want to take all the trees because then we get all that sunlight on the forest floor and the ground dries out again. So we’re taking out some of the trees. So there’s less straws coming out of the ground, but we’re leaving enough so that there’s quite a bit of shade.” – Liam Parfitt, Owner, Freya Logging Company

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Twitter: @AdamBerls

Email: Adam.Berls@pattisonmedia.com