We would like to congratulate Kea Rutherford, recipient of UBC Faculty of Forestry's Best Masters Thesis Award for 2023. She partnered with us as one of the five community forest in the Kootenay region and measured key components of the wildland fuelbed in forest stands before and after treatment. Below is the abstract from her thesis and the full link is available on the BCCFA post.
Fuel treatment efficacy in fire-prone forests of interior British Columbia, Canada.
- Rutherford, Kea
Abstract
Extreme wildfire seasons have become a central challenge of forest management in western North America. In response to increasing wildfire risk, forest managers are proactively implementing fuel treatments.
Although impacts of fuel treatments have been studied in the western United States, comparable research in the fire-prone forests of western Canada is lacking. In this thesis, I used two approaches to assess the efficacy of alternative fuel treatments to mitigate fire behaviour and effects in the seasonally dry forests of southeastern British Columbia, Canada.
I partnered with five community forests in the Kootenay region and measured key components of the wildland fuelbed in forest stands before and after treatment.
For the first approach, I used the pre-treatment field data as a baseline and simulated 16 alternative fuel treatment scenarios that spanned the range of thinning, pruning, and surface fuel load reduction combinations being implemented in the region.
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