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Drafting…
– West Dalhousie Wildfire: Fighting Fire, Saving Forests, Rebuilding Futures
Forest NS ” Forestry Uncut”series, YouTube Video, Feb 6, 2026. “When an out-of-control wildfire tore through more than 8,400 hectares in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis County, it wasn’t just a story on the news — it was in the backyards of forest workers, landowners, and entire communities. In this episode of Forestry Uncut, host Todd Burgess, Executive Director of Forest Nova Scotia, takes you inside the West Dalhousie (Long Lake) wildfire response and its aftermath.” View rough transcript of section on What we can learn from the West Dalhousie fire. An extract:
TB: After a fire the work doesn’t stop when the flames go out one of the biggest questions is what happens to all that burnt wood?
Can it be salvaged, can we replant and restore the forest to a productive healthy state?
8400 hectors…how big is that , 18,000 acres…’just trying to put it into perspective for some of our listeners.
What about all that wood that’s there, is there any burnt wood that you’ll be able to use or what can we do with that, what about replanting, you know about any plans to get it back to a productive forest again?
SF: So there’s options. When fire ripped through Tantallon, we did a bunch of salvage harvests and with the artificial intelligence we have in the mill we can tell the difference between rot and burn, for instance, so we have the ability to process that wood.
And I think the fire itself was a tragedy, I think the biggest tragedy would be if there was if that forest resource went to waste.
And there was an opportunity to create a New Forest .
I think, in my personal opinion, there’s going to be an opportunity to harvest some of that wood, the window is short, you have about a year before it becomes valueless, and it starts to blow over
And I want to see New Forest there I want to see it sustainably managed.
You have a bunch of different land owners there; we lost two very nice with lots, Freeman Lumber last two very nice wood lots.. we lost our own woodlots ,and there’s a lot of different land owners there with a lot of different objectives, but it would be a tragedy if that wood didn’t get cleaned up and used in my personal opinion.
And I think it’s it’s an opportunity to provide some closure and help the folks that had to experience that in their own backyard move on as well.
I know we did work in Tantallon area after the fire, people were just so grateful to have that black mess cleaned up and see a New Forest we planted , and I think I’m hoping that we see a lot of that in the wake of this fire.
And I hope a lot of this wood is salvagable wood because if it lays down and dies it’s just going to create more fire load and it’s going to stop a New Forest from growing.
Like I said [I am] not a forester but I know a lot of foresters and we’re all saying they’re all saying the same thing.
– Harvesting Burned Trees May Seem a No-Brainer. But It Poses Big Risks
Ben Parfitt for The Tyee, Mar 17, 2026. Related to BC, but many of the concerns likely apply to NS. “…In January 2018, two of the most senior employees in B.C.’s Forests Ministry — chief forester Diane Nicholls and resource stewardship head Tom Ethier — issued a report intended to guide the response to the previous year’s massive wildfires. In 2017, fires burned one million hectares of forest, a then-record for the province and approximately two per cent of the province’s total forested land base. Another 200,000 hectares of grassland also burned that year. While Nicholls and Ethier said that it might make sense to log some of the burned forests to recover wood fibre, they said the primary focus should be on what portions of those extensively burned lands were left unlogged. They noted that salvage logging following fires can degrade forest soils, damage water supplies and alter peak water flows, which increases the risk of severe floods. They also warned that it might take decades to remediate the damage done by salvage logging in certain watersheds where wildfires had burned and that in the worst-case scenarios the damage done “may be irreversible in the context of forest management time horizons.” For that reason, Nicholls and Ethier said, logging should be the last consideration in managing burned forests. They said that sustaining forest ecosystems to help restore water quality and wildlife habitat was more important than salvage logging. They also stressed the need to weigh the cumulative impacts of logging, beetle outbreaks and wildfires, and consider the risk that more salvage logging could push already stressed ecosystems beyond the breaking point, to say nothing of plummeting timber supplies.Where post-fire salvage logging did occur, Nicholls and Ethier said, every effort should be made to minimize the impacts to timber supplies by shifting logging out of unburned forests into forests that had burned. Maps accompanying their report vividly highlighted the three biggest fires to burn in 2017 — the Plateau Complex fire near Quesnel, the Hanceville-Riske Creek fire near Williams Lake and the Elephant Hill fire near 100 Mile House. All those fires burned in areas that had earlier been subject to widespread beetle salvage logging. The colour-coded maps illustrated the average tree age in the forests that had burned. Although many burned trees were more than 140 years old, the fires also affected tree plantations less than 60 years old, with many of the younger forests the result of previous salvage logging. A new round of salvage logging in response to fires could easily set the stage for more plantations burning down in future years, making Parmar’s job of finding trees to cut down even more of a challenge than it already is.”
– 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.”