Exploring the Rocky Mountain fire environment

By Kiera Smith
​I recently returned from a four-month assignment with Parks Canada in the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks of Yoho, Kootenay, and Banff national parks. Fire management in these parks is a year-round activity, but field activities are concentrated in the spring and summer. This meant that I was involved in a wide variety of prescribed fire, wildfire, and fire research operations during my work assignment.

​In this area, Parks Canada conducts prescribed fires from April-June and in the fall. Spring prescribed burns occur when grass and shrubs are dry and easily ignited, but deeper ground layers and large downed wood on the forest floor are still moist from winter snowmelt. The Redstreak prescribed fire will help restore open forest and grassland habitat, improve access to higher elevation lambing sites for bighorn sheep, and maintain an important wildlife corridor linking the Kootenay and Columbia valleys in the southern portion of Kootenay National Park. Prescribed fire also provides additional wildfire protection for the community of Radium Hot Springs.

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​Historically, the area experienced frequent surface fires that maintained open grassland with mature Douglas fir scattered throughout. Exclusion of First Nations burning and fire suppression over the past 100 years enabled dense young Douglas fir trees to establish and eventually fill-in grassland areas (Smith, 2016). Parks Canada uses prescribed fires to remove understory vegetation, thin the stand, re-establish vital open grassland habitat and travel corridors for wildlife including Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, bears, and cougars. By removing fuel and reducing the density of the stand to a more natural structure, the prescribed fires also limit the potential for an intense crown fire in the future that could threaten surrounding populated areas. On May 3, 2018, I participated in a 5ha guard burning exercise completed with hand torches. The guard will provide a fuel free break for 60ha unit ignition the upcoming years. 

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​Student research projects can make important contributions to fire management operations. In my case, my previous research on fire return intervals in the Sinclair Restoration Area is helping fire managers decide when to schedule prescribed burns. This year, I shifted my research focus to the Vermillion Valley of Kootenay National Park where significant fires occurred in 2001, 2003, 2017, and 2018. My work included completing a review and case study of the 2017 Verdant Creek wildfire. I documented weather and fire behaviour conditions, as well as fire management operations during the fire.

​The Verdant Creek wildfire (2017) has created opportunities to study post-fire vegetation. When wildfires occur, Parks Canada uses the newly opened alpine habitat to plant whitebark pine seedlings. Whitebark pines are protected under the Species at Risk Act, which depend on wildfire to create critical habitat. This summer, I assisted with health assessments of seedlings planted last year following the Verdant Creek wildfire. One year post planting survivorship was found to be higher for seedlings planted in a burned area than an unburned area, and those planted in clusters more likely to be healthy than those planted alone. 

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In addition to the Verdant Creek wildfire, the Vermillion Valley has experienced multiple fire events within quick succession with some areas burned multiple times. Stand conditions following these repeated fires are not well understood or represented by existing classifications of stands used in fire behaviour prediction models (i.e., the Canadian Forest Fire Behavior Prediction System). This summer, I worked with the Joint Fire Science Program to determine how successional vegetation structure responds in these repeatedly burned areas.

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Other supplementary activities that kept me busy this summer included: predicting potential fire behaviour during the 2018 Wardle wildfire using the 2003 Tokumn-Verdendrye burn as a guide; helping to develop a protocol to validate fuel moisture estimated from weather station data; and serving on an Incident Management Team as the Documentation Unit Lead to collect data for future fire weather and fire behaviour studies.

I would like thank all those at Parks Canada who helped to make this summer a successful learning opportunity, with special thanks to Jed Cochrane and Kris Beattie.
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Smith, K.A.P. (2016). Dendrochronological Investigations of the Fire History in the Sinclair Restoration Area, Kootenay National Park, British Columbia. Retrieved from: http://hdl.handle.net/1828/7208