Forest fires as news stories have always been popular. That has never changed. What has changed, however, is how the news media cover them. Not so long ago, the B.C. Forest Service welcomed reporters and photographers out to the front lines, to get up close to the fire and the forest firefighters working hard to…
Crews started work this week on a prescribed fire in the Dormer River Valley in Banff National Park to restore the grasslands in the area. On Thursday, about 30 firefighters from Parks Canada and Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development went into the back country to burn in a 6,800-hectare area. Staple/Parks Canada / For the Calgary Herald They will burn again in…
A large fire raging in British Columbia’s Central Interior has grown dramatically over a 24-hour period, reversing some of the progress achieved by crews struggling to contain the aggressive blaze. The Little Bobtail Lake fire southwest of Prince George has ballooned more than 40 per cent since Saturday, from 170 square kilometres to 240 square…
Woodland caribou in northeast British Columbia are headed for extinction and could become the first subpopulation of a species to vanish in Canada while under government protection. Researchers from the University of Northern B.C. and the province say five herds are collapsing even though the government is pursuing a recovery strategy that includes captive breeding,…
British Columbia has experienced a significant increase in wildfire activity in the last decade, and if predictions from government fire scientists come true, we can expect to see further increases in burned area and cost in the coming decade. With each catastrophic fire season since 2003 there has been calls to dramatically increase the use…
A large forest fire in northern B.C. is growing as firefighters struggle to contain the out-of-control blaze that has forced dozens of people from their homes. Crews worked through Sunday night to dampen the wildfire, which by Monday afternoon had expanded to consume 27 square kilometres of land near Norman Lake, about 50 kilometres southwest…
35,000 Ecuadoreans will volunteer to plant over 350,000 tree seeds on 16 May, breaking a Guinness World Record in the process. Seeds will be planted across the country, in a massive reforestation effort confirmed as unprecedented by Carlos Martinez, director of the Latin-American branch of World Guinness Records. The government is hoping to show its…
Blight has made the American chestnut, once “the dominant tree in the canopy,” a rare sight in the forests of the East. Now some researchers hope to save the tree by giving it a last-ditch genetic modification, reports David Biello for Scientific American’s 60-Second Science podcast. Scientists first noticed the fungal blight in 1904. It slides into the trees…
While the City of Calgary is working double-time to get through even a portion of the damaged trees from ‘Snowtember’, individual Calgarians also have a lot of work left to do. Tree Canada has sent representatives to Calgary’s Disaster Alley on Saturday, to announce some help in the form of $83,000. Mike Rosen, president of…
The annual number of forest fires this year is the highest it’s been in a decade, according to the province’s forest fire prevention agency (SOPFEU). In Quebec, 192 fires burned more than two million square metres (two square kilometres) of forest since the start of 2015. In the month of May alone, five forest fires popped up in eastern…