Drafting…
– After the fires: what do we do when primary forests burn?
Conservation North Video on YouTube, posted Dec 24, 2024. 43 min. Scientific Lit references are shown in slides.
Topics:
Fire in BC
Complexity and biodiversity
What post-disturbance logging does to the land
Fire messaging manipulation from industry and government
What we do in a new climate-fire era
Why wildlife need all primary forest, not just old growth
– Logging’s Final Frontier? How “Active Management” Imperils Forest Resilience (YouTube)
Conservation North, Sep 24, 2025 “Dr. David LindenmAyer is a renowned Australian Professor of Ecology and Conservation Biology at the Australian National University’s Fenner School of Environment and Society. [Discusses imacts of post-fire logging]
Dr. Dominick DellaSala is the former Chief Scientist at Wild Heritage, and former President of the Society for Conservation Biology, North America Section. Herb Hammond is a BC-based forest ecologist and retired Registered Professional Forester with more than 45 years of experience in research, industry, teaching and consulting.
Self-thinning forest understoreys reduce wildfire risk, even in a warming climate
PJ Zylstra, SD Bradshaw, DB Lindenmayer 2022.
Environmental Research Letters 17 (4), 044022. PDF
Removing dead trees will not save us from fast-moving wildfires
Dominick A DellaSala et al., 2025. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) PDF
“Policymakers and communities are racing to find ways to tackle the risk of fast- moving fires. These fires are increasingly common as climate change intensifies the fire impacts on landscapes that are often dominated by people. Blazes can race through an area at a rate of more than 16 km2 in a single day (1). Fast fires burn grasslands, shrublands, logging debris, and parched (but still-green) forests under weather anomalies that produce high winds, fuel aridity, and extreme temperatures. Under these conditions, fires are nearly impossible to extinguish and often spill into urban areas, where houses and other buildings are the primary fuel source.
“In response, plans are being drawn up to log trees that have been damaged or killed by natural disturbances but remain standing (snags). Supporters of this approach, including California governor Gavin Newsome, members of Congress, and the USDA Forest Service claim that removing these trees is the most effective means to reduce the fast-fire risk. Unfortunately, such actions are fundamentally flawed.
“There is little evidence that removing dead trees en masse is an effective strategy to contain fast fires. In fact, a substantial body of evidence shows that such large- scale tree removals will have cumulative and mostly negative ecosystem and climate consequences, reducing the ability for ecosystems to regenerate after severe natural disturbances, emitting vast quantities of carbon from commercial logging activities, and increasing the risk of fires and floods. Put simply, the wholesale removal of dead trees will make the fast-fire situation worse.
“Here, we offer a way forward for decisionmakers to effectively reduce the risk of spillover fires to communities, and to avoid blaming fast fires on dead trees…”
Ladder fuels rather than canopy volumes consistently predict wildfire severity even in extreme topographic-weather conditions
Christopher R. Hakkenberg et al;., 2024 in Nature Communications “…we found a positive concave-down relationship between GEDI-derived fuel structure and wildfire severity, marked by increasing severity with greater fuel loads until a decline in severity in the tallest and most voluminous forest canopies. Critically, indicators of canopy fuel volumes (like biomass and height) became decoupled from severity patterns in extreme topographic and weather conditions (slopes >20°; winds > 9.3 m/s). On the other hand, vertical continuity metrics like layering and ladder fuels more consistently predicted severity in extreme conditions – especially ladder fuels, where sparse understories were uniformly associated with lower severity levels. These results confirm that GEDI-derived fuel estimates can overcome limitations of optical imagery and airborne lidar for quantifying the interactive drivers of wildfire severity. Furthermore, these findings have direct implications for designing treatment interventions that target ladder fuels versus entire canopies and for delineating wildfire risk across topographic and weather conditions.”