Ed Trenchard, provincial wildfire management specialist, does long-term planning with communities and industry on how to mitigate risk, and also works on the ground.
Federal officials have said Canada has seen an unprecedented wildfire season this year, with nearly 179,000 square kilometres burned as of late September, versus the 10-year average of about 2,700 for that time of year. In Alberta this year, fires forced the evacuation of several communities, including Edson and Drayton Valley in the west and Fort Chipewyan in the northeast.
Alberta's wildfire agency has partnered with software company AltaML to try to predict where fires are going to start the day before they happen so they can better plan resources. Erickson said wildfire officers put people, equipment, aircraft and other resources in place as part of pre-suppression efforts in case of a fire breakout.
“It's developed with machine learning, which is a subtype of AI technology that basically analyzes tons of data that they've collected over the past couple of decades about fires in the province," Erickson said. Trenchard said Alberta keeps an intensive database going back decades of where fires have started, what the weather conditions were at the time, what type of trees were burning and how the fire started.