There’s a significant concern from the 2018 wildfire season in British Columbia – a number of seedlings have been destroyed as a result.
John Betts, the Executive Director of the Western Forestry Contractors Association says it could have been a lot worse. Roughly, 1.3 million hectares was scorched which could mean planting another 70 million seedlings just to catch up.
“Those are considerable losses,” said Betts, adding we were given a bit of a break.
“One of the advantages, if you can call it that, is that this years fires were not so much in the timber harvest land base as last year even though they got bigger numbers. They tend to be burning off in areas that we have not been using for resource extraction.”
Betts doesn’t know how far back tree planting efforts have been pushed this year.