Fire behaviour in jack pine / black spruce forest fuels following mulch fuel treatments: a case study at the Canadian Boreal Community FireSmart project
Forest fuels engineering is one of the primary wildfire mitigation strategies advocated by FireSmartâ„¢ Canada (Partners in Protection, 2003) and applied by partnering wildfire management agencies and industry operators. Over the past two decades, mechanical forest fuel treatments (including mulching) have been extensively applied in and around communities in the wildland-urban interface to mitigate the risk of wildfire. Fuel managers and fire operations managers would like to better understand how manual and mechanical fuel treatments modify fire behaviour.
Fuel treatment efficacy has been evaluated through post-wildfire case studies (Mooney, 2014; Pritchard et al., 2011), fire behaviour modelling (Fernandes, 2009; Stephens et al., 2009) and subjective expert opinion based approaches (Hayes et al., 2008). The use of experimental fire to evaluate the effectiveness of fuel treatments is limited.