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A century of transformation: fire regime transitions from 1919 to 2019 in southeastern British Columbia, Canada

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Abstract

Context

In fire-excluded forests across western North America, recent intense wildfire seasons starkly contrast with fire regimes of the past. The last 100 years mark a transition between pre-colonial and modern era fire regimes, providing crucial context for understanding future wildfire behavior.

Objectives

Using the greatest time depth of digitized fire events in Canada, we identify distinct phases of wildfire regimes from 1919 to 2019 by evaluating changes in mapped fire perimeters (> 20-ha) across the East Kootenay region (including the southern Rocky Mountain Trench), British Columbia.

Methods

We detect transitions in annual number of fires, burned area, and fire size; explore the role of lightning- and human-caused fires in driving these transitions; and quantify departures from historical fire frequency at the regional level.

Results

Relative to historical fire frequency, fire exclusion has created a significant fire deficit in active fire regimes, with a minimum of 1–10 fires missed across 46.4-percent of the landscape. Fire was active from 1919 to 1939 with frequent and large fire events, but the regime was already altered by a century of colonization. Fire activity decreased in 1940, coinciding with effective fire suppression influenced by a mild climatic period. In 2003, the combined effects of fire exclusion and accelerated climate change fueled a shift in fire regimes of various forest types, with increases in area burned and mean fire size driven by lightning.

Conclusions

The extent of fire regime disruption warrants significant management and policy attention to alter the current trajectory and facilitate better co-existence with wildfire throughout this century.

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Data availability

The data used in this manuscript are publicly available through DataBC and can be accessed at https://catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca/dataset/fire-perimeters-historical.

Code availability

The R code used in this research is available upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We respectfully acknowledge that the land where we conducted our research is the unceded ancestral territory of the Ktunaxa (Tenaha), Secwepemcúl’ecw (Secwépemc), sn̓ʕay̓čkstx tm̓xʷúlaʔxʷ, (Sinixt), and Niitsítpiis-stahkoii (Blackfoot Confederate Nation). We thank Steve Taylor, George Eade, Aaron McMillan and the BC Wildfire Service for providing information on the public datasets used in this study. Thank you to Raphael Chavardès, Greg Greene, and Bob Gray for contributing data on historical fire frequency. We thank Phil Higuera and two anonymous reviewers for providing comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Funding

This study was funded by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant Discovery Grant (SEG), Canada Wildfire Network Grant (LDD), Canada Graduate Scholarship – Masters (JNB), Condula and Gunter Paetzold Fellowship (JNB), CanFor Corporation Fellowship (JNB), and VanDusen Graduate Fellowship (JNB).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada

    Jennifer N. Baron, Sarah E. Gergel & Lori D. Daniels

  2. USDA-FS, Pacific Northwest Research Station, Wenatchee, WA, 98801, USA

    Paul F. Hessburg

Authors
  1. Jennifer N. Baron
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  2. Sarah E. Gergel
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  3. Paul F. Hessburg
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  4. Lori D. Daniels
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Contributions

JNB, SEG, PFH, and LDD: conceived and designed the study. JNB: analyzed the data, interpreted the results, and drafted the initial manuscript. SEG, PFH, and LDD: contributed to several manuscript revisions.

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Correspondence to Jennifer N. Baron.

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Baron, J.N., Gergel, S.E., Hessburg, P.F. et al. A century of transformation: fire regime transitions from 1919 to 2019 in southeastern British Columbia, Canada. Landsc Ecol 37, 2707–2727 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-022-01506-9

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