Fire regime and management in Canada's protected areas

Abstract

Wildland fires are a vital ecological process in Canada's protected areas (PAs), resulting in both ecological benefits and detrimental disturbances. In the face of rapid global changes, maximizing fire's ecological benefits while minimizing its negative impacts is particularly difficult but essential for PA fire management. To facilitate fire management in Canada's PAs, we conducted a comprehensive review of fire regimes and management strategies in PAs using several scholarly sources and national databases. We found that a high proportion of protected areas are in the remote boreal forest region or the Montane Cordillera. Fire regimes varied from the high-intensity fires in the boreal forest region to the more complex mixed-severity fires in the Montane Cordillera ecozone. Numerous fire tools and science-based management plans have been developed to address the varied and complex fire regimes. However, many challenges are still presented under longer fire seasons with increasingly severe burning across the country. To cope with these challenges, we proposed a protection-conservation integrated fire management framework. It is expected to improve the capability of the existing tools in guiding both fire protection and ecological fire use in Canada's PAs.