Jasper Athabasca Valley Fires

Ecologist Gerald Tande took wedges and disks from hundreds of trees to develop the following set of maps that approximate burning patterns in the Athabasca Valley around Jasper townsite. 1 These maps and their amazing dataset of tree age and fire-scar observations have helped inform a series of recent studies of landscape change and detailed fire history near Jasper. 2 More then/now images of vegetation change near Jasper are available here. 

Source: Tande, G. F. “Fire History and Vegetation Pattern of Coniferous Forests in Jasper National Park, Alberta.” Canadian Journal of Botany 57 (1979): 1912–1931.

Map and Footnotes

  1. Tande, G. F. “Fire History and Vegetation Pattern of Coniferous Forests in Jasper National Park, Alberta.” Canadian Journal of Botany 57 (1979): 1912–1931. ↩
  2. For example see: Rhemtulla, J. M., R. J. Hall, E. S. Higgs, and S. E. Macdonald. “Eighty Years of Change: Vegetation in the Montane Ecoregion of Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada.” Canadian Journal of Forest Research 32 (1999): 2010–2021; Chavardès, R. D., and L. D. Daniels. “Altered Mixed-severity Fire Regime has Homogenized Montane Forests of Jasper National Park.” International Journal of Wildland Fire 25-4 (2016), 433–444. ↩