Fire-Harvest Blueprint

While forest harvesting in Alberta has evolved over decades to better emulate natural disturbances, the ecological effects are still markedly different than wildfires. On the other hand, governments are limited in their ability to implement prescribed fire: many areas are unsafe to burn, some years have very short or non-existent weather windows, they are expensive to execute, and they lack public support (see Benefits of Disturbance). But the Healthy Landscapes Program is exploring a way to combine the disturbance types to get the ecological benefits of fire and the predictability of a harvest plan.

This project lays the groundwork for a future bold experiment: a joint prescribed burn – harvesting plan at operational scale. One hypothetical is to lay out the harvests to create a perimeter of fire breaks and recover the most valuable timber, and then perform a prescribed burn within the perimeter. While unorthodox, this could be a powerful tool for creating more natural disturbance, and being able to perform prescribed burns more predictably and economically.

Before such a management plan can actually be approved, the Healthy Landscapes team including Andison and prescribed fire experts from both Canada and the US are working out the details for preliminary steps, such as how to manage risk, who takes on which responsibilities, and identifying policies that will enable this new kind of plan. And, as always when challenging the status quo, an essential element in this project is to build trust between everyone involved. A 2025 workshop brought together forest managers in government and industry to discuss options for how this might be done. The team identified a series of next steps and are working with prescribed fire experts on a report sharing expertise.