Inaccurate data on forest fuels may stoke B.C. wildfires, study finds
VANCOUVER — Wildfire fighting and forest management decisions are potentially being hampered by inaccurate government data that misrepresents forest fuel loads in British Columbia’s Interior, a new study has found.
The B.C. government says the provincial wildfire service is working with the study’s lead author and others to close the data gap, which involves “mismatches” between remotely-sensed mapping, forest fuel classifications, and observations on the ground.
“These mismatches make it difficult for fire managers to accurately determine expected fire behaviour before an event occurs,” the researchers say in the study published in the peer-reviewed journal Fire Ecology last month.
The mismatches may also result in failure to identify at-risk areas that would benefit from work to mitigate the fuel buildup, the paper says.