Yale Environment 360 reports:

Climate change is extending the season during which hot and dry weather encourages fire across North America. At the same time, a long post-settlement history of stamping out wildfires has changed much of the continent’s landscape: Forests are thicker, which allows fires to spread up into the canopy, and more uniform, with fewer bare patches that might otherwise slow a fire’s progress. As a result, wildfires now tend to grow hotter and bigger: Some say we are in the age of megafires.

Forest ecologist Lori Daniels, at the University of British Columbia, has found evidence in tree rings for surprisingly high rates of fires before the early 1900s, thanks to the Indigenous use of fire to manage huge swaths of forest. In British Columbia, after European settlers put an end to burning, much of the forest changed dramatically: In one study site, Daniels and her colleagues have documented 200 to 775 trees per hectare — more than four times the historical average of 50 to 190 trees. North America, researchers say, is running a “fire deficit.”

Daniels is one of many ecologists now advocating for a return of more beneficial fire to the landscape in order to break up the forest and prevent catastrophic wildfires. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, she spoke about the need to fight fire with fire.

“There’s a school of thought that you can just put a fence around a forest and keep people out, and it will be protected,” she says. But when Europeans arrived to North America, forests “were not empty lands that happened to look like that. They were being actively managed.” [Continue reading…]