Parks Canada deferred all major prescribed fires in the mountain national parks this year – a move being criticized by one of the key players involved in developing the agency’s national prescribed fire plan.
Officials say the prescribed fires were deferred because the funding pool was tapped out for the year, with money being spent on other ecological projects across the country, including prescribed fires in parks in Saskatchewan.
“In the short-term, those dollars will be ‘re-profiled’ into future years,” said Rick Kubian, resource conservation manager for Lake Louise, Yoho and Kootenay.
“We’re still committed to that funding being there in the future. It’s just delayed in the short-term, but we remain absolutely committed to that program in the mid-term.”
Parks Canada has a national goal of restoring fire within national parks to 50 per cent of the long-term fire cycle by attempting to duplicate natural processes as closely as possible by igniting prescribed fires.
It is believed fires in Banff National Park burned an average of about 32,000 hectares a decade prior to 1880, but increasing control in the following 100 years continually reduced burn areas.
But now scientists know that prescribed fires do important work that pays dividends for decades. For example, they help maintain quality habitat for many large animals like elk, moose, sheep, deer, wolves and bears, and control insect populations.
As well, planned and managed burns help reduce the threat of a wildfire ravaging towns.
The decision against moving ahead with any prescribed burns this year in Banff, Yoho and Kootenay is being criticized by some scientists and researchers, who fear budget restraints within the agency could lead to further delays.
Cliff White, a park warden for 37 years before his retirement in 2009, was heavily involved in the development of Parks Canada’s advanced prescribed burn program across the country and he says the decision against burning this year is short-sighted.
“The short-sighted decision to stop getting your smoke in ‘little puffs’ is only leading to the eventual ‘big puff’, which isn’t good for the ecosystem, or the tourism business,” he said. “Much of Yellowstone was shut down during their big fire of 1988.”
White worked with Banff’s prototype fire management team to implement a high intensity prescribed fire program in the 1980s, and from 1987 to 1990, was the national fire management co-ordinator in Parks Canada’s Ottawa headquarters.
White said prescribed burning is like making regular payments on a VISA card, adding it reduces biomass and forest cover before it becomes unmanageable.
“And like your VISA card, if you make payments on only 50 per cent of your bill, or worse, none of it, your household will collapse,” he said. “In Banff Park’s situation, the household we’re talking about is the home for grizzly bears, bighorn sheep, moose and elk.”
Funding for prescribed fires currently comes from the Action on the Ground, a five-year, $70 million investment into ecological enhancement projects.
Parks Canada was unable to provide the dollar figure at press time on how much was up for grabs across the country this year as part of the Action on the Ground program.
According to Parks Canada, a prescribed burn typically costs about $200 per hectare, but can be more or less depending on the size or nature of the burn, whereas a wildfire is more in the range of $1,000 per hectare.
Several fires were on the books for Banff, Yoho and Kootenay national parks this year – although it was never intended that all of the five fires would go ahead.
In Banff National Park, there were hopes for a 355-hectare fire near Carrot Creek to strengthen a firebreak in the lower Bow Valley, as well as increase the ecological health of the area.
There were also plans outlined for a prescribed fire in the Baker Creek drainage aimed at improving grizzly bear habitat, and a small fire adjacent to the Harry’s Hill residential subdivision to protect homes from a potential wildfire.
In addition, there was a fire on the books for Redstreak Mountain in Kootenay, aimed at restoring open forest and grassland ecosystems, and helping to protect Radium from wildfire.
In Yoho, fire crews had previously written up a plan to burn an area near Mount King in a bid to fight pine beetle spread and to act as a fuel break in the Kicking Horse Valley.
Except for Carrot Creek, all were planned for fall.
Kubian said it’s important to note that specific conditions – such as weather, forest dryness and required firefighting crews – may not occur every year and, therefore, not all fires on the books would go ahead anyway.
He said because of the lightning-sparked Octopus Mountain fire in Kootenay, it would have been unlikely there would have been any prescribed fires in that field unit anyway.
“We’ve got a wide geographic range to our burns and usually we’re aiming to get one done,” Kubian said. “This year, I don’t think we would have burned anything anyway because we were busy with Octopus.”
From an ecological perspective, Kubian said, he sees no harm in skipping a year of prescribed burns.
“We don’t have to burn every year in the mountains,” he said. “If you look at how the fire cycle played out over time, there were periods of no burns and periods where there was.”
White, however, said that there are also other concerns with the decision to defer prescribed burns, noting prescribed burning is as much an art as it is a science.
“Watching a good prescribed burning team in action is like a beautiful ballet. Everything happens at the right time,” he said. “If the teams don’t light burns for a year or two, they get rusty, and it’s hard to make a safe comeback.”
Meanwhile, a small four-hectare study burn was done at the Ya Ha Tinda Ranch at enclosed vegetation plots. Parks Canada and the University of Alberta are assessing the ecological state of rough fescue grasslands in the ranch area.
