Seven hundred years of human-driven and climate-influenced fire activity in a British Columbia coastal temperate rainforest

Seven hundred years of human-driven and climate-influenced fire activity in a British Columbia coastal temperate rainforest

While wildland fire is globally most common at the savannah-grassland ecotone, there is little evidence of fire in coastal temperate rainforests. We reconstructed fire activity with a ca 700-year fire history derived from fire scars and stand establishment from 30 sites in a very wet (up to 4000 mm annual precipitation) temperate rainforest in coastal British Columbia, Canada. Drought and warme...

The Northern Inland Temperate Rainforest of British Columbia: Old Forests With a Young History?

The inland temperate rainforest (ITR) in east-central British Columbia is marked by superlative examples of old-growth cedarhemlock forest. How long has this old-growth forest structure been a major component of this landscape? What is the biological and conservation significance of the history of this forest type? Here we present paleoecological evidence from a study in the Robson Valley of th...

Climate Change and Health in British Columbia

Harvesting and climate effects on organic matter characteristics in British Columbia coastal forests.

As part of investigations into the effects of harvesting old-growth forest, we characterized carbon in five organic matter pools in eight forest chronosequences of coastal British Columbia. Each chronosequence comprised stands in four seral stages from regeneration (3-8 yr) to old-growth (>250 yr), with second-growth stands mostly of harvest origin. Stands were located in two biogeoclimatic sub...

Income inequality and health. Coastal communities in British Columbia, Canada.

OBJECTIVE An imbalance in the distribution of economic resources, i.e., income inequality, is a characteristic of a community that may influence the aggregate health of the population. In North America, income inequality seems to be strongly related to mortality rates among American communities such as states and metropolitan areas but largely irrelevant for health at similar levels of geopolit...