Ellen Whitman

New research suggests that fast-moving wildfires, such as the Bald Range blaze near Summerland that forced recent evacuations, are burning bigger and leaving ­forests less able to grow back to their ­pre-burn state. The study analyzed nearly 3,500 fires across Canada and the western U.S. between 2012 and 2023. Researchers used satellite data to track how quickly fires spread each day. They found the fastest-moving fires burned more severely, killed more trees and made it more difficult for forests to regenerate. “It’s not necessarily incredibly surprising that fast-moving fires are responsible for the largest area burned. But we now also show that they have pretty outsized ecological impacts as well,” said Ellen ­Whitman, one of the study authors. Those impacts can range from changing the tree makeup of a forest, “something we have been seeing quite a lot in the northwestern boreal,” Whitman said, to no tree regeneration at all, a result Whitman called “pretty extreme.”