Lori Daniels and a team of researchers plan to let a hand GPS guide them in a few weeks more than 100 places in the carbonized forest around Jasper, high.
In each location, submerge a stake on the ground and take notes. Are the needles in the trees? The branches? How far is the carbonized tree? Are the roots exposed?
In less words, they will ask: How bad was the fire?
Daniels, who has returned to Jasper several times from the destructive fire last summer, says he has parted the answer to that question.
There are parts of Jasper’s fire that were absolutely shocking. “– Lori Daniels
“I have seen many devastating fires in the British columbia in the last decade. I have spent a lot of time in Burnt Forest,” said Daniels, professor and co -director at the Forest Fire Coexistence Center of the University of Columbia British.
“And I have to say that there are parts of Jasper’s fire that were absolutely shocking.”
It has been almost a year since the forest fires whipped by the wind burned a third of Jasper’s structures to the ground.
Outside the boundaries of the city, what happened in the almost 330 square kilometers of the sung forest has interested researchers.
They want to know if more than 20 years of forest management affected the behavior of the fire, since it ran to the place of the town, and if there was a fire tornado during the fire.
Parks Canada had done an extensive work to lose weight the forest covered with vegetation that surrounds the city during that two decades, Daniels said, which had several research plots in the year before the fire. She said she believes that much of Jasper is still standing due to the efforts of Parks Canada, including burns and cut trees.
Canadian forest agencies are still trying to discover the best ways to treat their forests so that a forest fire can be slowed before reaching a community, Daniels said.
The next investigation could help Parks Canada and the provincial agencies of forest fires to calculate whether treated parts of the forest helped firefighters protect the neighborhoods.
“[It’s] A really critical question. The treatments cost thousands of dollars per hectare, tens of thousands in some environments, “he said. Insured fires of the fire have been estimated at approximately $ 880 million.
Parks Canada is supporting Daniels’s research. He is also carrying out a “series of investigations and reviews related to the fire,” he said in a June statement.
Changing forests
Laura Chasmer, assistant professor at the University of Lethbridge, had 34 research plots in Jasper before last summer, 19 of which were burned in the fire. She and a group of students continue to investigate prior to the type of fuels that accumulate in forests and can make forest fires more vicious.
Part of that research has sought to understand how peats and trees killed by Pine Beetle can contribute to the spread of forest fire.
“Climate change is changing forests so that we really don’t understand,” said Chasmer.
One of Chasmer’s students will join Daniels this month when the research on Jasper begins.
“It was really difficult for us to return there,” said Chasmer on Jasper, where he has conducted field research since 2021. “But I think we can learn a lot from this fire.”
Fire tornadoes
If there was a tornado during the fire, researchers from all over the country have also intrigued. Mike Flannigan, research president of the Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC, publicly suspected that a fire -induced tornado occurred during Blaze Jasper.
“Surely it sounds and it seems that it was a tornado,” he said.
Researchers of the Tornados Project of the North of the University of Western in London, Ontario, are trying to accurately confirm what happened in the Jasper Inferno.
Aaron Lawrence Jaffe said there are suspicions of the weird phenomenon.
Huge stripes of thousands of trees were uprooted or broken, said the project engineering researcher. And the debris, including a shipping container, several heavy -duty metal garbage containers and heavy peas of fires, threw themselves hundreds of meters from their original points.
“It was different from any survey of damage to the wind you have done before,” Jaffe said. “There is evidence that there were some kind of vortex.”
The type of damage witnessed could only have been created by winds of about 180 kilometers per hour, he said.
His team also took photos and videos of Drones from damage to help find potential patterns that could have been caused by a tornado.
Look | The report suggests that Alberta hindered the response of Jasper’s forest fires:
On Thursday, the municipality of Jasper published a review of the 2024 forest fire, which describes two dozen ways in which it could improve their forest fire response. Jasper Fire recommended improving coordination, saying “the jurisdictional overlap with the province created political challenges that interrupted the approach of incident commanders.”
However, he said, firefighters are an incipient research field, since very few have been registered worldwide. The lack of radar coverage in Jasper is also a complicating factor for researchers, which makes it difficult to determine if there was a tornado.
They also expect data from federal researchers, which would help determine if there was a fire induced climate that could generate a tornado.
Jaffe said his laboratory hopes to have an official response in the coming months.
