Reducing wildfire fuel in a forest is one problem.

Finding someone willing to pay for the material that comes out is another.

That distinction sits at the centre of new commercial-thinning trials being conducted by FPInnovations with forest companies in British Columbia and Alberta.

In Prince George, FPInnovations is working with Carrier Lumber to compare commercial-thinning scenarios under different assumptions about which fibre markets are available.

One scenario assumes markets for both sawlogs and pulp.

Another assumes sawlogs are the only commercial outlet.

Others introduce biomass, including a case where material that might otherwise have been sold as pulp fibre is instead directed into a biomass stream for chipping.

A second trial with Vanderwell Contractors near Calling Lake, Alberta, is testing different sawlog topping diameters, recovery of smaller material and treatment of residual biomass on extraction trails.

The researchers are collecting productivity and cost information alongside measurements of fuel loading and potential wildfire behaviour.

No final results have been published yet.

But the design of the experiments already highlights an important issue for Canada’s forest-products industry.

Wildfire mitigation may become much easier to scale when the material removed from the forest has several places to go.

That connects forest resilience directly with the health of sawmills, pulp mills, biomass users and emerging wood-fibre markets.

Commercial thinning is not simply logging fewer trees

Commercial thinning differs from conventional final harvest.

Instead of removing most of a mature stand, operators selectively remove part of the growing stock before the final harvest.

The objective can include improving growth of the remaining trees, changing stand structure, capturing intermediate fibre and increasing resilience.

British Columbia’s current guidance identifies several potential benefits, including supplementary fibre supply, improved growth of retained trees and wildfire-risk mitigation. The province has been expanding the role of commercial thinning as part of broader active forest management.

FPInnovations has been working on the concept in the B.C. Interior for years.

Its 2022 operational manual specifically described commercial thinning as one possible response to fibre shortages caused by disturbances including beetle outbreaks and wildfire.

That gives thinning two potential economic roles.

It can influence the future stand.

And it can generate usable fibre today.

The difficulty is that much of that fibre may be relatively small, low-value or expensive to extract.

That is why the market assumptions in the Carrier Lumber trial matter.

The pulp mill may change whether a thinning treatment is economic

Consider a stand containing several qualities of wood.

Some stems may produce sawlogs.

Smaller or lower-quality material may still be usable as pulpwood.

Other material may be suitable only for biomass.

If all three markets exist within a reasonable hauling distance, the contractor can potentially generate revenue from a much larger proportion of the material removed.

If the pulp market disappears, part of the fibre basket suddenly loses a buyer.

The forestry prescription may not change.

The economics can.

That is precisely what FPInnovations is trying to isolate by comparing different market scenarios.

The question is essentially:

What happens to the economics of the same forest treatment when one outlet for fibre disappears?

That question is becoming increasingly relevant in western Canada.

Pulp mills are not merely downstream manufacturers.

They are also buyers of material that may have limited value elsewhere.

Sawmill residual chips are the most obvious example, but low-grade roundwood and other fibre streams can also depend on pulp demand.

When those markets weaken or disappear, more of the economics of removal have to be carried by the sawlog or biomass portion.

Biomass can become the market of last resort—but value matters

Biomass creates another possible outlet.

Material unsuitable for lumber or pulp may potentially be chipped for:

heat,

power,

pellets,

biofuels,

or other bioenergy applications.

British Columbia has explicitly connected fibre-recovery projects with pulp, pellet and energy facilities. Provincial programs have been moving material that otherwise could have been burned in slash piles or left in the forest into industrial fibre streams instead.

That sounds straightforward.

Economically, it is not.

Biomass generally has a lower value per cubic metre than sawlogs.

Transporting low-density material can be expensive.

Chipping costs money.

Loading and unloading cost money.

Moisture content influences energy value.

Distance to the customer becomes critical.

A biomass outlet therefore does not automatically make a thinning operation profitable.

But it can improve utilization of material that would otherwise have no commercial destination.

That may become particularly important when pulpwood markets are unavailable.

The Carrier Lumber trial appears designed to quantify exactly that trade-off.

A missing fibre market can become a wildfire-management problem

This creates an important link between mill economics and landscape management.

Suppose thinning a high-risk forest stand costs more than the value of the sawlogs removed.

If pulpwood can also be sold, the treatment deficit becomes smaller.

Add a biomass outlet, and more residual fibre generates revenue.

Remove both of those markets, and the same wildfire treatment may require substantially more public funding or may not be carried out at all.

In other words:

the viability of wildfire mitigation can partly depend on industrial demand for low-value wood.

That is a very different way of thinking about pulp mills and biomass facilities.

Their value is normally discussed through tonnes of product, jobs and export revenue.

But they can also create a market for fibre that forest managers may want removed for other reasons.

FPInnovations itself identifies the lack of markets for the full fibre basket as one of the major constraints on Canada’s fibre supply and bioeconomy.

The wildfire trials put that problem into an operational context.

This does not mean every thinning treatment reduces wildfire risk

There is an important technical qualification.

Removing trees does not automatically make a stand safer from fire.

Thinning changes the structure of the fuel.

It can reduce canopy density and interrupt the vertical and horizontal continuity that supports crown fire.

But cutting trees also creates:

branches,

tops,

small stems,

needles,

and other slash.

If that material remains on the ground, surface fuel can increase.

FPInnovations has studied this problem for years.

Its earlier research on thinned lodgepole pine specifically noted that while thinning reduces overstorey fuel loading, harvesting can increase surface fuels if slash is left untreated.

Separate FPInnovations work has described fires in scattered harvest debris as potentially intense and difficult to suppress.

That is why the current trials need to measure more than tonnes removed.

They need to measure where the fuel ends up.

The Alberta trial may be especially useful for that reason

The Vanderwell trial near Calling Lake includes treatment of residual material on trails.

That may sound like a secondary operational detail.

It is actually central to wildfire behaviour.

Mulching converts standing and vertical vegetation into a compacted surface fuel bed.

That can reduce ladder fuels and potentially moderate some types of fire behaviour.

But the effect is not universal.

FPInnovations’ previous research has explicitly asked whether mulched fuel acts as a fuel break under some conditions or as a “wick” capable of sustaining fire under others.

Research elsewhere reaches a similar conclusion.

A 2026 study in interior British Columbia found that combined thinning and burning substantially reduced fire hazard, while thinning alone can have much more variable results because untreated residues can increase surface fuel.

This is why simply reporting hectares thinned can be misleading.

A successful wildfire treatment depends on:

what was removed,

what remained,

where residual material was placed,

how quickly it dries,

the stand type,

and the weather under which a future fire occurs.

Pulp and biomass recovery can therefore serve two purposes

This is where fibre procurement and fire management start to overlap.

If smaller stems and residues can be economically removed from the site and sold, operators may achieve two outcomes at once:

reduce part of the hazardous fuel load,

and provide industrial feedstock.

That is potentially preferable to cutting material and leaving large amounts of it behind.

But removal also creates another cost.

Every tonne hauled out of the forest requires machinery, fuel, handling and transportation.

So the optimal outcome is not necessarily “remove everything.”

It is the point where the added fire-management benefit and fibre value justify the added recovery cost.

That is why productivity data are just as important as wildfire metrics in the FPInnovations trials.

A treatment that performs very well in a fire model but costs several times what forest managers can afford is difficult to deploy across millions of hectares.

Different topping diameters can change the fibre equation quickly

The Alberta trial’s testing of topping diameters illustrates this problem neatly.

When a tree is processed into a sawlog, operators need to decide how far toward the small end of the stem it remains worth recovering merchantable wood.

A smaller top diameter captures more volume.

But the additional pieces are smaller.

Processing productivity may decline.

Handling costs rise.

The resulting material may move into a lower-value product category.

Changing the topping diameter can therefore alter:

sawlog recovery,

pulpwood recovery,

residual biomass,

machine productivity,

and the amount of material left on site.

That makes it an economic and wildfire-management variable simultaneously.

The most aggressive fibre recovery is not necessarily the most profitable treatment.

Nor is it automatically the best fire prescription.

The trial is useful precisely because those outcomes need to be measured together.

Canada’s fibre shortage makes the question more urgent

The trials are occurring while western Canadian forestry is already looking for additional economical fibre.

FPInnovations identifies falling allowable annual cut, climate impacts, insects and wildfire among the pressures affecting fibre availability. It specifically highlights underused and low-value fibre as a potential part of the solution.

British Columbia has been moving in the same direction.

In 2026, BC Timber Sales said it planned to auction 1.5 million cubic metres of pulp-focused timber sales, a volume the province estimated could support a pulp mill for roughly nine months. It is also expanding commercial thinning and other stewardship treatments intended to improve forest health while generating fibre.

That is an important policy change.

Fibre supply and forest treatment are increasingly being considered together rather than as separate files.

For pulp producers, that can create access to material outside conventional final-harvest flows.

For governments, industrial demand can potentially reduce the net cost of landscape treatment.

But the value chain has to exist before the treatment happens

This creates a chicken-and-egg problem.

A biomass plant needs confidence that enough fibre will be available before it invests.

Forest managers need a biomass customer before they can economically recover low-grade fibre.

A pulp mill needs long-term wood supply to justify capital expenditure.

Forest treatments become cheaper if the pulp mill remains open.

If one part disappears, the economics of the others change.

This is why local industrial ecosystems matter so much.

A region containing:

sawmills,

a pulp mill,

pellet or biomass facilities,

and efficient fibre logistics

can potentially place different portions of the same harvested tree into their highest-value practical use.

A region with only one viable buyer has fewer options.

That is also why a pulp-mill closure can have consequences far beyond its employees.

The missing mill can remove the market for an entire fibre grade.

The FPInnovations trial effectively puts a number on that problem by asking what commercial thinning looks like with and without the pulp market.

Wildfire mitigation needs economics because the treatment area is enormous

Canada cannot treat every hectare of forest.

Nor should it.

Fuel management is generally targeted toward places where changing forest structure can most effectively reduce risk to communities, infrastructure or other values.

Natural Resources Canada says fuel, weather and topography all influence fire behaviour, and it identifies forest thinning as one of several tools that can be incorporated into broader strategic wildfire-risk management.

That context matters because thinning should not be sold as a universal wildfire solution.

Extreme fire weather can overwhelm treatments.

Fuel treatments do not stop every fire.

FPInnovations itself emphasizes that treated areas are most useful as part of a wider suppression and risk-reduction strategy rather than as guaranteed barriers.

The economic question is therefore not:

Can Canada log its way out of wildfire?

It cannot.

The useful question is:

Where thinning is already silviculturally and strategically appropriate, can recovered fibre reduce enough of the treatment cost to make more hectares feasible?

That is much more defensible.

Commercial thinning also has a longer-term timber-supply dimension

Wildfire is only one side of the equation.

Commercial thinning can influence the future value and structure of the remaining stand.

By reducing competition, retained trees can gain greater access to light, water and nutrients.

B.C.’s guidance identifies improved growth of residual trees as one of the treatment’s potential benefits.

Previous Carrier Lumber-associated commercial thinning work has also examined the possibility that intermediate harvests can increase the amount of recoverable wood over an entire rotation even when final-harvest standing volume does not necessarily increase.

One documented B.C. trial projected approximately 10% to 20% more captured wood volume over the rotation when the intermediate thinning volume was included, although that was a site-specific modelling result and should not be generalized to every forest.

That introduces another time horizon.

The treatment may produce fibre now.

It may change future log dimensions.

It may affect future harvesting economics.

And it may alter wildfire behaviour between those two harvests.

A good prescription has to consider all of them.

This is why the trials should not be judged solely by cubic metres recovered

When FPInnovations eventually publishes results, the easiest metric will be fibre volume.

How many cubic metres of sawlog?

How much pulpwood?

How much biomass?

Those numbers matter.

But they will not be enough.

The more useful comparison should include:

harvesting cost per hectare,

machine productivity,

haul distance,

revenue by fibre stream,

net treatment cost,

residual surface-fuel loading,

changes in crown and ladder fuels,

future stand condition,

and expected effects on fire behaviour.

That would allow forest managers to ask a much more valuable question:

How much wildfire-risk reduction can be purchased per dollar once fibre revenue is included?

That is the number capable of changing policy.

The economics will also be highly regional

Even if the Carrier Lumber trial produces an attractive result, it cannot simply be copied across Canada.

Distance matters enormously.

A stand located 30 kilometres from a pulp mill has different economics from one 250 kilometres away.

Species matter.

Tree size matters.

Terrain matters.

Road access matters.

Machine choice matters.

Pulpwood prices matter.

Biomass prices matter.

Local wildfire objectives matter.

A commercial-thinning system viable near Prince George might fail elsewhere even under an identical silvicultural prescription.

That is not a weakness in the research.

It is exactly why testing different market configurations is valuable.

Rather than asking whether commercial thinning is generically “economic,” FPInnovations is moving toward the more useful question:

Under what market conditions does it become economic?

The most valuable result may be finding where the treatment does not work

That is worth emphasizing.

Innovation programs often highlight successful demonstrations.

For forest management, a negative economic result can be just as useful.

If researchers determine that sawlog-only recovery leaves a treatment far below economic viability, that tells governments what the pulp market is worth to wildfire management.

If biomass recovery improves economics only within a short haul radius, planners can map where biomass infrastructure actually matters.

If reducing topping diameter captures more fibre but lowers harvesting productivity enough to destroy the value, managers can avoid that prescription.

If mulching increases problematic surface-fuel behaviour under certain conditions, that can change treatment design.

Those are valuable findings.

The purpose of the trials should not be to prove that commercial thinning solves wildfire.

It should be to establish where it works, what it costs and which industrial markets make it viable.

The pulp and paper industry has a stake in the outcome

For pulp producers, the research may open another discussion about fibre supply.

Commercial thinning does not replace conventional wood supply.

Volumes, quality and cost may be very different.

But in regions where fibre availability is tightening, intermediate harvests and wildfire-risk treatments could become supplementary sources.

That fits a broader shift already visible in Canadian forestry.

Governments and industry are increasingly looking at:

residuals,

low-grade logs,

salvage,

commercial thinning,

and other underutilized fibre streams

as part of the effort to support existing industrial capacity.

The difficult part is making those streams economical.

The FPInnovations trials are therefore relevant well beyond wildfire specialists.

They matter to mill procurement teams.

Biomass processors.

Sawmills.

Contractors.

Provincial forest planners.

And communities whose local industrial infrastructure helps determine whether hazardous forest material is worth removing.

The real product may be a business case for resilience

The most interesting outcome of this research may not be a new harvesting technique.

Commercial thinning already exists.

Mulching already exists.

Biomass recovery already exists.

The innovation is in putting those pieces into the same economic model.

For decades, wildfire mitigation and fibre procurement could be treated as separate objectives.

One was a public-safety or land-management cost.

The other was an industrial supply-chain activity.

The current trials suggest those boundaries are becoming less useful.

A tree removed to change fire behaviour can also be a sawlog.

A smaller stem can become pulpwood.

A residual stem can become biomass.

Revenue from those products can offset part of the treatment cost.

And the existence—or absence—of each buyer changes how much forest management is economically possible.

That is why the Carrier Lumber scenarios are so important.

They are effectively asking what a pulp mill, biomass market or additional fibre outlet is worth before the material ever reaches the mill gate.

The answer could change how Canada thinks about forest-industry infrastructure.

A mill is not only a place that consumes fibre.

Under the right conditions, it can also be part of the economic infrastructure that makes forest resilience possible.

The trials still have to prove how large that effect really is.

But that is the question worth measuring.

Canada already knows how to remove forest fuel. The harder problem is creating enough value from that material to afford removing it at scale.

Last Updated on 16/09/2026 by Jota Machinery