University of Ottawa Professor Hossein Bonakdari’s latest research hopes to help Canadian authorities better anticipate wildfires across the country by mapping out the most vulnerable areas across the country. Professor Bonakdari, an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Engineering whose work examines wildfires in Canadian, delves into this year’s severe wildfires in Western Canada and how to prepare for future fires.
Question: Why has B.C., specifically, been hit so hard this year?
Hossein Bonakdari: BC had one of its warmest winters on record, which meant record-low snowpack – which is the moisture reservoir that keeps forests hydrated well into summer – at valley bottoms across the Interior. Add persistent, multi-year drought in certain areas and the province was structurally primed before the first spark of the season. Other provinces are seeing elevated risk too, but BC entered the year with the deepest moisture deficit of anywhere in the country, which is exactly why our risk map has consistently shown the Interior sitting in the severe band.
Q: Your research has created a risk map, which is a single tool to helping identify the compounding factors and predict areas vulnerable to wildfires.
HB: Our Canada satellite map identifies which parts of the country have underlying vulnerability and the ingredients for fire to take hold, something that won’t change even as climate shifts. What changes is how often those ingredients line up: hotter, drier summers are simply hitting the identified "primed" zones more frequently and more intensely now. Our model is built from stable and slow-changing factors, vegetation, terrain, and typical climate patterns to show where Canada is structurally prone to severe fire. It runs on near-real-time satellite data rather than just historical averages, so it can be updated as vegetation dries out or drought deepens. It is a living risk gauge compared to a fixed forecast, identifying where fire is structurally likely, with conditions indicating how urgent the risk is in real time.
Q: Fires like Bald Range are described as 'explosive' or growing faster than expected. What is fueling this?
HB: Bald Range is a textbook example of a fire creeping outward at a steady pace and feeding itself. Extreme drought had already dried out the fuel and then wind and heat multiplied the impact. Dry fuel burns hotter and this extra heat dries out the vegetation ahead even faster, priming it to ignite the moment the fire reaches it. The fire is not just moving into new terrain; it is actively pre-drying its own path forward. Standard forecasting tends to treat temperature, drought, and wind as separate inputs, which is exactly why growth this fast keeps catching people off guard, the danger is not any one factor, it is what happens when they all peak at once.
Q: What role is climate change playing in this?
HB: Climate change is what is shifting the baseline underneath the variability. A warmer atmosphere pulls more moisture out of soil and vegetation, so even a normal dry spell now dries out fuel faster and more completely than the same dry spell would have 30 years ago. What we're seeing in BC this year, record-low snowpack, an early snowmelt that gave forests weeks of extra drying time before fire season even began, and now a developing Super El Niño forecast to be one of the strongest ever recorded, all of that lines up with what climate scientists have been warning about for years: hotter, longer, more volatile fire seasons. No single fire is caused by climate change, but the conditions are becoming more common because of it, not despite it.
Q: How will this new tool help authorities moving forward?
HB: Wildfire planning in Canada is often reactive, responding once fires are already burning. We hope to flip that by giving authorities a country-wide picture of where the risk is structurally highest before fire season starts so resources can be ready. It also helps identify communities, including remote and Indigenous communities, which may be at high risk but are not yet on anyone's radar. Because the model lines up with over 93 percent of where fires have burned historically, it is not just theoretical, it has been tested against reality. Longer term, it gives policymakers a foundation for smarter land management, from forest thinning to post-fire restoration funding, targeted at the places that need it most instead of spreading thin nationally. In short: it turns "we'll deal with it when it happens" into "we already know where to look."
Media may directly contact Professor Bonakdari for interviews via email:[email protected]
Further media requests: [email protected]