Researchers study fungi, beetles and birds in B.C. to understand post-fire recovery

ROCK CREEK · As global wildfire seasons intensify, Canadian researchers are looking into the charred landscapes of British Columbia's interior to learn how life returns after the flames. They are studying charcoal-munching fungi, heat-sensing beetles and at-risk carnivores to understand which species thrive and why their recovery matters for biodiversity. Four of the five worst years recorded for global forest fires have occurred since 2021, with 2026 seeing hundreds of thousands forced to flee blazes across North America, Europe and Africa. "All terrestrial animals evolved in landscapes that had fire," said Canadian conservation biologist Karen Hodges. "It goes all the way back to the beginning."

Hodges, a conservation biology professor and researcher at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, noted that many species in the B.C. Interior became fire-adapted deep in their evolutionary past. "Conifers have all sorts of adaptations to be able to withstand fire," she said. The province's vast Montane Cordillera ecozone, an area slightly larger than Sweden, is the country's most biodiverse and encompasses fire-adapted ecosystems. This interior region stretches from the Pacific east into the Rocky Mountains and from the U.S. border north to the subarctic.

Near the community of Rock Creek, the hillsides are covered with thousands of charred, limbless trees, a legacy of a fast-moving wildfire in 2015 that burned 4,417 hectares of forest. "I thought we were going to die. I thought we were going to burn. The wind was blowing, and it was coming for us," one woman told a local reporter at the time. Residents and 200 tourists fled, and dozens of homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed. Eleven years later, the same scorched place is rich with new greenery, including purple silky lupine, white snowberry bells and verdant tree saplings.

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According to Vancouver-based mycologist Monika Fischer, much of the credit for this comeback belongs to underground activity. "Plants are total wimps and just an expression of the microbial community in the soil," Fischer said. She runs the Fischer Fire Fungi Lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, closely tracking after-fire fungi. Her interest began while working as a chef wanting to learn what makes food taste good, leading to an internship where farmers taught her about the soil microbiome and mycorrhizal fungi.

In August 2020, while Fischer was in California, a freak dry lightning storm ignited hundreds of fires. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged, she and her graduate assistant rushed into the field wearing N95 masks to guard against smoke. "At the time the fires were happening, it was really scary," Fischer recalled. "Multiple fires happened within an hour's drive of where I was living. That meant I had a front row seat to the recovery." She was especially looking for a pyrophilous, or fire-loving, fungus called Neurospora, whose lifecycle in the wild is largely unknown.

Fischer noted that when fire is recent and moisture is present, a consistent cast of fungal characters tends to appear. Plum-purple fireplace cups emerge from scorched earth, yellow-brown charcoal-loving elf cups blister up from the black, and Anthracobia fungi deliver dense packages of tiny orange cups. "It's this barren moonscape and all of these fungi are just thriving," she said. For millions of years, pyrophilous fungi have depended on wildfire heat, smoke or ash, sending threads called mycelium into charred soils to digest what remains. "One of the fungi that I study, we know [now] they're totally able to eat charcoal as a carbon source, which was really surprising to us," Fischer said, referring to Geopyxis carbonaria, or charcoal-loving elf cups. She believes these fungi help kick-start post-fire recovery by knitting the soil together and creating a spongy structure that allows water to infiltrate. "They're really good at scavenging ... nutrients in the soil and liberating carbon out of the charcoal and kickstarting nutrient cycling back into these ecosystems," Fischer explained.

With files from news