Prescribed Burning Impacts On Some Coastal British Columbia Ecosystems

Prescribed burning is widely used as a forest management tool. This paper quantifies the impacts of fires of different severity on woody debris and soil organic horizons. Three low-severity spring burns, two high-severity fall burns and two unburned controls were established on three sites near Port Alberni, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Most of the low-severity spring burn area was accidentally reburned during an adjacent high-severity fall burn, resulting in a very high-severity burn.

Fire ecology is a scientific discipline concerned with natural processes involving fire in an ecosystem and the ecological effects, the interactions between fire and the abiotic and biotic components of an ecosystem, and the role of fire as an ecosystem process.

Fire suppression results in dramatic structural and compositional changes in many vegetation communities. The use of prescribed fire to restore a community to historical conditions may be unsuccessful if the trade-off between adequate fire severity and mitigation of fire risk is too conservative. Managers need detailed information on fire behaviour and vegetation response to effectively make decisions about the trade-off between risks and effects. In this report I describe the immediate effects of a prescribed fire in a meadow that ha s experienced tree and shrub encroachment due to fire suppression and climatic factors. Less than three months after the fire, the meadow community as a whole showed little response to the treatment. Of the life form groups and culturally important plants that I examined, only herbs and grasses showed significant burn effects. Species richness was unaffected by the burn.