A sustained increase in the severity of wildfire season, not just in British Columbia, but across Canada, has spurred the creation of a new research lab at Simon Fraser University, according to the scientist who will lead it.
Sophie Wilkinson, an assistant professor at SFU’s School of Resource and Environmental Management, currently has four students at the Fire and Ecosystems Research Lab. Together, they’re studying wildfire behaviour, wildfire impacts, and the conditions that fuel them.
“It just started so we’ll be growing the lab because there’s a lot of need for this work,” Wilkinson told Global News on Saturday. “The current research, I’m really looking at beetle-attacked forests, which of course is very common across British Columbia.”
Wilkinson said her field teams are trying to find out how pine beetle infestations in western Canada impact a fire’s behaviour, and in particular, a high-severity fire. If severe enough, such blazes can impact the ability of a forest ecosystem to recover, she added.
“These are the fires that are the most difficult to manage and suppress and they emit the most carbon,” Wilkinson said.
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“My research lab does a lot of field work — they go out to the forest, and they see the impact that the fire has, and that enables us to measure things about the severity of the fire, how much carbon is lost, and then we can start to think about how the system might recover.”
The lab’s goal is to develop ecosystem management strategies to mitigate the damage to forests and people in a world impacted by climate change.
A news release from SFU said the Fire and Ecosystems Research Group is also collaborating with the Canadian Forest Service, Provincial Parks, and other resource and land managers from different industries.
One of Wilkinson’s recent papers, published in the peer-reviewed Nature, Climate Change in April, found that wildfires reduce the ability of northern peatlands to store carbon, a greenhouse gas, by 35 per cent, while enhancing emissions from degrading peatlands by 10 per cent.
“We know that with the increasing fire activity that we’re really reducing the capacity of our big terrestrial carbon sink,” she explained. “Northern peat lands are one of them. We did find that by the end of the century, if our projections are correct, northern peatlands won’t be storing as much as they were which is a concerning feedback for the climate.”
Canada is in the throes of its worst wildfire season on record. There are currently more than 360 wildfires burning in British Columbia alone.
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