Fuel Reduction in WISA Area Reduces Fire Risk and Protects Habitat

Photo by Lyle Grisedale

For the past 20 years, the City of Kimberley, in cooperation with provincial experts, the Kimberley Nature Park Society, forest licensees, and BC Wildfire service, has conducted wildfire risk reduction work in the Kimberley Nature Park and surrounding areas. Most of the forests within the park are considered fire-maintained ecosystems; meaning that fine fuels were historically consumed by frequent, low-intensity fires. With fire excluded from the landscape over the last century or more, fuel has built up, resulting in increased fire risk near Kimberley and many other communities. 

High fuel levels combined with increasingly severe fire weather puts us in a dangerous situation: a wildfire would be more severe and a greater threat to the community. In the absence of any fuel treatment, a wildfire would kill virtually all mature trees along with consuming much of the ladder and other fuels, potentially doing long term damage to forest soils. And the high intensity of a wildfire with these fuel conditions would make fire fighting much more difficult.

Given this growing threat, the City has accessed provincial funding for large thinning projects to address high-risk areas at a landscape scale. Recently, much of the risk-reduction effort has focused on the southeast part of the Nature Park, in what we call the WISA WHA (Williamson's Sapsucker Wildlife Habitat Area). The WISA area contains critical habitat for a species at risk, and some of the most impressive old forest in the Nature Park.

Photo by Lyle Grisedale

This 80ha area was assessed to be in need of removal of surface and ladder fuels, in order to preserve, maintain, and enhance its ecosystem values. Given the slightly more remote terrain and critical habitat to be protected, hand thinning is the ideal method. Work was safely carried out around live and dead wildlife trees, and in and around large down logs, all important WISA habitat.

Last November, crews completed some areas near Duck Pond and Skinkuc Trails by burning slash piles that were created through the fuel reduction work. More pile burning will be carried out this fall to finish the project.

After all this work, will the forest and its habitat survive a wildfire? Well… in the event of a wildfire moving through this part of the KNP, some important habitat like large logs will be lost.  But because a fire would likely remain on the ground, most of the mature trees will probably survive as opposed to being burnt up or severely scorched. A few large trees will succumb to the fire or subsequent insect attack, creating more habitat as part of the long-term cycle of nature. In some areas, a wildfire will act almost as a “treatment” by reducing fuel levels and by rejuvenating forest ecosystems that haven’t seen fire in a long time.

In general, this thinning plus pile burning work gives the City or province the opportunity to conduct prescribed burns in spring or fall to maintain a safer level of fuels over time, as would have been the case historically.