Canada's forests will recover from wildfires — but they won't be the same

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This year's wildfire season in Canada is on track to destroy four times more land than any previous year on record, but researchers say nature is resilient and regeneration is still possible. 

Understory plants — grasses, flowers, purple fireweed and even some aspen shoots — are already rising up through the barren landscapes and charred trees of the aftermath.

That's because fire is part of the natural cycle and vegetation can grow back very quickly, says Edward Struzik, author of Dark Days at Noon: The Future of Fire.

"It's a natural process because really our forest — the boreal forest — is born to burn," he told The Current guest host Anthony Germain. 

But there's a difference between "born to burn" and the intensity of the fires we're seeing this summer, he said. 

Climate change is increasing the amount of out-of-control wildfires across the country, and their severity combined with heat domes and droughts means forests aren't able to regenerate the same way they used to, said Struzik. 

Ellen Whitman, a forest fire research scientist with Natural Resources Canada, is optimistic the ravaged forests will come back, just not in the same way as before. 

"When we have very, very big fire years like this one, there are some shifts that can occur," she said.

In the boreal landscapes hit hardest by this season's wildfires, Whitman suspects more fire-resilient vegetation will take the place of conifer trees with needle leaves and cones.

Conifer trees take much longer to recover after fires, she said, so they're often unable to develop their seed banks or seal them up in a cone before another fire comes in and wipes out the beginnings of a new forest.

"We might instead expect to see more of an open, low-density forest with a lot of broad leaves or even very few trees," said Whitman. 

"But if we have that particular shift, you can think about some species benefiting and some species not doing so well."

Wood bison, buffalo and moose do really well with the shift toward a more open, grassy landscape, but caribou do not, she said.