Wildland fire prevention: the impact of the Modifying Industrial Operations Protocol on the growth of industrial forestry-caused wildland fires in Ontario, Canada
Kevin Granville
A * , Douglas G. Woolford B , C. B. Dean C and Colin B. McFayden D
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, Canada.
B Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada.
C Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada.
D Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, Aviation, Forest Fire and Emergency Services, Dryden, ON, Canada.
* Correspondence to: kevin.granville@uwindsor.ca
International Journal of Wildland Fire 31(9) 825-834 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF22074
Submitted: 4 November 2021 Accepted: 19 July 2022 Published: 15 August 2022
© 2022 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of IAWF. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)
Abstract
Background: Industrial forestry operations in Ontario, Canada, may be restricted to reduce the risk of wildland fires. This is currently done according to the Modifying Industrial Operations Protocol (MIOP), which was implemented in 2008 as a replacement for the Woods Modification Guidelines that had been in place since 1989. One of MIOP’s objectives is to limit the negative impact or damage caused by fires ignited by industrial forestry operations.
Aims: Treating the incremental growth between discovery and final sizes as a measure of suppression effectiveness, we aimed to characterise and contrast growth distributions for three successive time periods using data spanning 1976–2019 on Crown forest areas of Ontario.
Methods: Stratifying by first responding group (Ontario Ministry vs forestry personnel), we tested for evidence of changes in the growth distribution using the Kruskal–Wallis and Mann–Whitney U tests.
Key results: We found iterative improvements between successive time periods (Pre-Woods, then Woods Guidelines, then MIOP) in the growth distribution of fires first responded to by forestry personnel.
Conclusions: MIOP appears to be successfully limiting the negative impact of industrial forestry fires while increasing operational flexibility relative to the Woods Modification Guidelines.
Implications: MIOP has been implemented in a manner that still encourages safe operations while not contradicting this objective.
Keywords: empirical cumulative distribution function, fire growth, fire size, forest fire, initial response group, Kruskal–Wallis test, Mann–Whitney U test, regulations, wildfire risk mitigation.
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