Benefits of Disturbance
How do members of the public understand forest disturbances such as wildfire, forest harvesting, and insect infestation?
For thousands of years, fire has been part of the boreal forest’s cycle of renewal and regeneration. This disturbance regime dominated the great green stripe across what is now Canada, until settlers arrived in numbers and imposed a new kind of regime on nature. Some forest was cleared for agriculture, settlements, and industrial use, but perhaps even more significantly, a policy of fire suppression for about a century has rebalanced the mix of forest ages. experts are now in broad agreement about the advantages of reintroducing fire to the landscape and beginning to return to a pre-industrial mix of habitats.
No such consensus exists among the public, as was discovered during the first phase of this project, led by Drs. John Parkins at the University of Alberta surveyed 8,000 residents of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. Throughout 2024 and 2025, the team, which included scientists from the Canadian Forestry Service ave been analyzing the data and working on publications to share the results, including reports, presentations, and a paper. The final phase of the project is an annotated review of the scientific literature on disturbance.
8,000 people in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba surveyed on different types of disturbance.
A webinar and report were delivered to project partners, and an open access paper published.
