Under Saskatchewan skies thick with wildfire smoke in July, a bright blue UBC Forestry truck blaring country music headed west. While particles of burned forests clouded the sun, the researchers behind the wheel set out to understand how to help forests regenerate after the flames cool.
“Every time I see smoke in the air I think my research is applicable because things are actively burning," aid UBC PhD student Sarah Smith- Tripp. "We have to think about how things will look in the future."
Members of the UBC Integrated Remote Sensing Studio, including Smith-Tripp, took a two-week remote sensing fieldwork road trip across the country. From the Acadian broadleaf forests of New Brunswick to BC’s temperate rainforests, they used drones to scan landscapes from timber plantations to bare ash.
The researchers call themselves the “Scantiques Roadshow.”
The Scantiques Roadshow is a part of a Canada-wide study that focuses on developing new methods to monitor how forests respond to disturbances like wildfires, droughts and pests.
Canada’s forests are incredibly diverse, both in the species they host and in how they’re managed. What unites them all though is that as the climate changes, forests are changing too.
Groups including the timber industry, provincial governments and First Nations need to know how they are changing so they can prepare.
That’s where the Scantiques Roadshow’s mission to develop better remote sensing methods comes in.
BC wildfires are out of control
From when the Scantiques Roadshow left from Halifax on June 30 to their return to BC 12 days later, Canada experienced over 500 wildfires — a brief snapshot of the country’s most severe fire season on record.
Driving through recently-burned forests, the earth still looked burned out and barren.
“It’s quite like a moonscape — hours of trees laying on the ground,” said Smith-Tripp. “It’s somewhere that doesn’t function like so many other forests.”
That’s her description of the site of the 2017 Plateau Complex fire, an amalgamation of several smaller fires in Northeast BC that burned a total of 5,451 square kilometers — larger than Metro Vancouver.
It includes parts of the Quesnel Forest District, which is one of Smith-Tripp’s main study sites. Smith-Tripp said that it’s too early to tell whether the burned parts of the forest will regenerate — but that it is likely more resilient than it appears.
These forests have bounced back from, and sometimes because of, disturbances for tens of thousands of years — something that the Indigenous communities of the region know well.
The Plateau Fire site overlaps the territories of First Nations including Dakelh and Tsilhqot’in communities. They have practiced controlled burns for thousands of years to minimize the risk of bigger runaway wildfires.
Controlled burns usually occur in the wet season to clear out dead wood, germinate fire-dependent seeds and make room for biodiverse new growth. Often led by expert elders, burns also connect communities to traditional cultural practices and help new generations learn from the land.
Provincial settler forest management has suppressed those fires and outlawed controlled burns since the 1870’s — a paradigm that has only started to shift in the last five years, according to research by UBC’s Tree Ring Lab.
Not only has state fire suppression stolen First Nations’ sovereignty, research shows it’s harmed the forests by making them more susceptible to bigger fires and invasive species.
Colonialism doesn’t show up directly on remote sensing scans, but it has shaped how forests grow and how they burn.
“That’s something that as a remote sensing scientist I’ve started to grapple with because it becomes so easy to be removed from your studies,” said Smith-Tripp. “You can’t be remote in your actual science.”
To fix that disconnect, Smith-Tripp said that her study site engages with the local community. People from the city of Quesnel, including forestry experts from the Nazko First Nation, come to conferences to share their priorities, which helps shape the data that the researchers collect.
According to Smith-Tripp, the Nazko First Nation was particularly interested in “managing and restoring forests for important salmon habitat.”
Slowly, some state policies may be listening. BC Community Resilience Initiative Grants are funding education and planning for fire in the Nazko First Nation. It won’t fix centuries of mismanagement, but according to Smith-Tripp, it’s a place to start.
Remote sensing for resilience
From the ashes, sometimes new growth emerges. Smith-Tripp described a burn site from 2006 that is now lush and green.
“In areas that have good regeneration, they don’t feel so apocalyptic,” she said. “Sometimes, when you leave the forest alone, it’ll just fix itself.”
Could that lush landscape be what the sites of the 2017 Plateau Complex fires near Quesnel look like in twenty years? Part of the Scantiques Roadshow team’s job is to find out why some forests grow back relatively quickly while others falter.
“Understanding what forests look like after a disturbance occurs is really important, “said Smith-Tripp. “We also should plan for that sort of resiliency within forests because we know that our forests are operating under greater stresses.”
While BC is currently dealing with the direct impacts of wildfires, the slower work of regeneration that happens next is just as important. That includes creating and maintaining grasslands as natural firebreaks, and ensuring that invasive species don't get a foothold.
William Nikolakis is a UBC researcher that works with the Tsilhqot’in First Nation to restore controlled fire to the landscape.
According to Nikolakis, forest fire agencies often direct all their energy to salvage forests that are still standing, instead ofrehabilitating burn sites.
“Now’s the time to put attention into those lands that have been burned, not turn away from them,” said Nikolakis. “Otherwise … we’re essentially kicking the can of wildfire risk down the road for future generations to deal with it.”
The stakes grow each decade as global average temperatures creep upward. Climate change impacts forests in complicated ways that are often difficult to predict — from wildfires that burn hotter, longer and more frequently to insect outbreaks as species’ ranges change.
Smith-Tripp is still in the data analysis phase, developing categories for different types of regeneration to try and identify what contributes to each outcome.
This can hopefully help forest managers know what they need to do to help forests recover and adapt.
“Climate change is a global problem with local solutions,” said Smith-Tripp. “What is happening at a site in BC is not the same thing that’s happening at a site in Acadia, but the technology that we can use to monitor and make suggestions can be the same.”
LIDAR doesn't miss the forest for the trees
To keep track of Canada’s huge and rapidly-changing forest ecosystems, remote sensing technology is becoming increasingly important.
“The value of remote sensing is that it takes people out of the field, it decreases the cost and it increases the amount of data that we have to give managers,” said Smith-Tripp.
Her study is part of a larger project called Silva21, a $5 million National Science and Engineering Research Council grant dedicated to getting as much data on different aspects of Canada’s forests as possible.
Since the Scantiques Roadshow is about collecting data about forests, the applications to forest management change based on who’s using it.
“We met with somebody who works for Ontario Forests, with people that work for Natural Resources Canada, and all of those people have the forest in mind but will ask very different questions of those forests,” said Smith-Tripp.
At that point, it's a question of politics and power as much as ecology. LIDAR is a tool, and Smith-Tripp said that how industry or governments use the information it provides is mostly out of her hands.
Smith-Tripp’s team uses a remote sensing method called LIDAR, which stands for “light detection and ranging.” LIDAR works by scanning objects or landscapes with a light pulse sent from a drone, airplane or even some of the newer iPhones. By measuring the time it takes for light to reflect back, it can map out the contours of landscape onto an accurate 3D model.
They combine LIDAR data with high-definition aerial photography and multispectral drones, which collect detailed colour data to see where forests are "greening up," according to Smith-Tripp.
Combining these methods can create detailed 3D models that can be analyzed remotely to diagnose problems, monitor progress and keep tabs on hundreds and thousands of miles of forest.
Some forestry professionals raise doubts about whether remote sensing can achieve the same accuracy as old-fashioned measurements. However, Smith-Tripp said the Integrated Remote Sensing Lab actually does the most fieldwork of any Faculty of Forestry researchers, combining methods for more detailed results.
“I went into forestry because I wanted to walk in the woods,” Smith-Tripp said. “My favourite thing is to tromp around in burned forests.”
She still tromps — and flies drones — around in forests, both burned and whole. With help, maybe burned can become whole again.
“There’s some areas where it’s just like, wow, how could this regrow?” said Smith-Tripp. “But at the same time ... woods can be really resilient.”