• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Cold, Wet Autumn Prevents Alberta From Lighting Pine Beetle Fires

Posted on: Friday, 5 October 2007, 18:00 CDT

By James Stevenson, THE CANADIAN PRESS

CALGARY - Cold, wet weather has delayed Alberta's plans for three controlled forest fires this fall along its boundary with British Columbia to slow down the pine beetle's voracious march eastward.

The province must now wait out the winter and attempt the "prescribed fires" in about six months before warmer spring temperatures cause forests to dry out and wildfire hazards get too high.

"Nature's just not co-operating right now," Rob Harris, a spokesman with Alberta Sustainable Resources, said Friday.

The biggest burn was to be a 112-square-kilometre fire in the Kakwa-Willmore interprovincial park north of Jasper National Park. There was also an 80-square kilometre fire planned for an area in the west-central part of the province near Nordegg.

"If we do find trees in that area that do have mountain pine beetle in them, we'll still be able to go in there and treat them with single-tree cut-and-burn operations," said Harris.

The third fire planned was a 13-square-kilometre blaze near Mount Nestor near Canmore in an area that straddles Banff National Park and the provincial Spray Valley Park. It lies just one mountain pass over to a swath of B.C. forest that has been completely stricken by the beetle.

But as with the other two fires, the province has been waiting for a dry autumn that never came.

"The weather's really started to cool down; there's been a lot of precipitation in that area," said Harris. "Chances are we're not going to get the type of burning conditions that we need to move forward with that prescribed fire."

If the forest isn't dry enough, a fire wouldn't burn hot enough to kill the trees and remove the beetle's food source. It would instead do the exact opposite - stress the trees and make them more susceptible to pine beetle attack.

Allan Carroll of the Canadian Forest Service said the delay will have little impact as long as Alberta manages to go ahead with the fires next spring.

That's because the main pine beetle flight - when the pests leave their host trees and travel hundreds of kilometres on wind currents, over mountain ranges and valleys in search of new ones - is mainly in August.

Carroll, one of Canada's top pine beetle researchers, also explained the goal is for the fire to destroy the trees but not the beetles. A blaze with temperatures high enough to kill the pests would be too hot to handle.

"When you're burning in an attempt to manage mountain pine beetle, the effort is not to kill the beetles, because you need a burn that's so intense that it's uncontrollable," he said from Victoria. "Instead, what you're trying to do is just burn to kill the trees, which removes the food from any new population."

Pine beetles have always been present in forests and regional infestations have occurred from time to time, but the absence of sustained cold weather in recent winters has been a key factor in the current crisis.

Add to that the fact that fire suppression over the last century has saved vast tracts of western Canadian forest, which are now older and more susceptible to infestation.

In neighbouring B.C., the beetle epidemic has infested 14 million hectares of pine forest - an area twice the size of New Brunswick.

Instead of trying to contain the insect and halt its advance, crews are resorting to "salvage logging" in an attempt to get whatever economic value is left in dead trees before they're too dry and cracked to go through mills.

The beetle epidemic is actually in decline in B.C. as the pest runs out of big quantities of mature pines. That should mean there are less beetles on the move into Alberta.

"The critical nature of this delay all hinges on whether or not more beetles get blown over the Rockies, which has a much lower likelihood as time passes because of the imminent collapse of the population in B.C," Carroll said.

Most of Alberta's pine beetle damage has been in the northwest corner around Grande Prairie. In the south, the Rockies have helped slow the beetle's progress.

The big fight now is to beat back the beetle's advance into the boreal forest, which touches the corners of northern B.C. and Alberta and stretches eastward right across Canada.

Source: Canadian Press

More News in this Category