British Columbia wildfires are burning out of control! There were a number of air quality warnings issued cross BC in summer 2018. Smoky air flew all the way to Alberta and even cross the border to US. It made me curious what’s going on with BC wildfires and what the situation was used to be.
Wildwire datasets for previous years and current year (updated in May 2018) were gathered from DataBC, data published by BC Wildfire Service. For relevance and clarity, data prior to 1980 is ignored.
Wildfires 1980-2017
Key findings:
- Close to 80,000 wildfires recorded, and 4.76 million hectares burned
- While the total number of fires has dropped 40% since 2000, areas burned i.e. fire damages have sharply increased 250%
- A diminishing trend with human-caused fire. On average, it accounts 45% of all fires and 24% of all damages.
- 2017 marks the worst fire damage in BC history, 1.22 million hectares burned, compared to a total of 3.54 million for all 36 years prior.
Hectares burned by wildfires in BC: 1980-2017
Large fires 1980-2017
According to Canadian Council of Forest Ministers report, a burned area greater than 200 hectares is considered a large fire.
In BC, there are 1141 large fires recorded, 1.43% of all fires. However, they caused over 95% fire damages. That is huge!
Below is an interactive map that marks the top 20 largest fires in BC from 1980 to 2017. The biggest fire was in 2017 Plateau wildfire (in Quesnel BC), and it burned through 0.5 million hectares!
Wildfires 2018 (partially)
2018 wildfire data was pulled from DataBC on August 25 2018, and it was published on May 16 2018 when BC’s fire season just started. So it is largely incomplete. Nevertheless, data was analyzed and plotted below. Despite of the incompleteness, wildfires already burned 0.5 million hectares before end of May 2018. I’d expect things had gone worse since then. Will do an update on 2018 when the final data becomes available.
So what can we learn from the data?
- Wildfires have become a more serious problem in recent years and threatening people’ life in BC.
- Although human-caused fires did not cause the same amount of damages as fires caused by nature, they account almost half of the fires. Effective wildfire education programs should be continued for reducing human causes.
- More resources should be directed to detect large wildfires in the central and northern regions of the province.
Code to run the analyses can be found on my GitHub.