Fire Research » Fire Ecology & Fire Effects

Fire Ecology and Fire Effects

General Overview

Research carried out within the Fire Ecology and Fire Effects research area provides the scientific basis for the use of fire in the sustainable management of Canada's forest resource. This is accomplished by elucidating the natural role of fire in Canada's forest ecosystems, simulating its effects in various forest regions under various fire regimes, and providing the ecological underpinnings required for the operational application of fire in natural resource management.

The program consists of four major components:

• Fire Effects Field-Based Ecology Research: to provide the data for construction of fire effects and ecosystem response models.
• Landscape-Level Simulations: to simulate forest development under various fire regimes and potential climate change.
• Prescribed Fire Guidelines, including the use of fire for ecosystem restoration: for the knowledgable application of prescribed fire to meet forest ecosystem management, wildlife habitat, and restoration guidelines in the production forest as well as conservation areas.
• Forest Ecosystem Management, by emulation of fire as a natural disturbance: EMEND (Ecosystem Management by Emulating Natural Disturbance) is a cooperative multidisciplinary research project in Canada's boreal forest to determine the harvesting level at which recovery of ecosystem structure and function will most closely resemble postfire trends.