alt Hacker NewsIn addition to climate change effects, do you think that preventing wildfires for decades contributes at all? My understanding is that managed burns can be useful at preventing the worst fire fires.
The fact that some trees only germinate in the presence of wildfires points to wildfires being a very natural and pre-human thing. And recent wildfire management practices are likely a strong factor in recent wildfires.
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managed burns have their place in ecosystems where they're common.
most of these fires in Canada are because it needs to be -40C for about 2 weeks to kill off the pine beetle . if the beetle doesn't die then it, as the name suggests, infests pine trees and kills them.
after a couple seasons you have massive, absolutely immense swaths of dead pine trees, full of flammable pine tar and sap. eventually they burn, and the warm temps + beetles mean they don't come back. ecological change, biome collapse.
I don't think that's as relevant for these huge regions of remote forest in Canada as it is for the lower 48 of the USA where you have a lot of population density and ranching and farming in the dry areas that historically burned on a regular basis. Maybe someone in rural Ontario knows the full story.
The answer is: It's complicated
https://www.wilderness.org/articles/article/5-big-myths-abou...
Ecologically, wildfires are necessary for some biomes. However, not all of them. Many are needlessly destructive due to climate change and over logging of forests.