| Summary: | Programs for the prevention and control of forest fires have evolved in response to a need to protect lives and property in forested settings, and to protect the perceived values of the forest itself. However, costs of these fire management activities have always been a concern to those who provide the funds, and considerable effort has been directed towards attempts to determine optimal levels of management effort. The question of costs has become more acute in recent years as forest services have developed increasingly sophisticated yet expensive methods for controlling fires. Compounding the problem has been an increase in frequency of fires. Determination of appropriate levels of fire control has been hampered by a lack of knowledge about the relationship between expenditure on fire control activities and the resulting area burned and losses incurred, and by an inability to describe the effect on this relationship of variations in fire season severity.
This dissertation addresses these questions using the conditions in Alberta as a case study. Five hypotheses were tested and substantiated.
1. Descriptive historical accounts of fire policy and fire seasons can be verified by analysis of actual annual expenditures on fire. Annual reports were reviewed to describe the evolution of fire management policies.
2. There has been a decrease in area burned which is related to increased fire management effort. Analyses of age-class distribution obtained from the provincial forest inventory were used as a basis for reconstructing an estimate of historical rates of burn for the past 80 years. Cost data were obtained to try to quantify the relationship between level of expenditure and rate of burn.
3. Variations in fire season severity can be described better than by existing methods by considering both the potential for fire spread and the actual number of fires. A new index of fire load which combined fire rate of spread with number of fires was developed which achieved this result.
4. Potential area burned in the absence of fire control may be estimated by means of a fire growth model. A fire growth model was developed to provide a mathematical basis on which to estimate area burned in the absence of any fire management activity.
5. There is a relationship among fire season severity, fire management effort, and area saved from burning. The combined relationships among fire season severity, fire management effort, and area burned or value were applied to illustrate some of the analyses which may be conducted with these data through evaluation of the Alberta situation. === Forestry, Faculty of === Graduate
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