Environment · 3D map
20.34 million hectares — what BC and Alberta have lost to fire since 2000
Every wildfire of ten hectares or more in British Columbia and Alberta from January 2000 through December 2025 is plotted on the satellite-imagery base below. Each fire appears in the month it ignited and stays on the map. 2023 alone accounts for 6.47 M hectares of the mapped area, more than the whole of the 2000s combined; measured by the provinces' own official season statistics, that year burned 5.05 M hectares (British Columbia 2.84 M, Alberta 2.21 M).
Download the high-resolution version (2160 × 2160) — free to reuse with credit to Open Data Canada.
Corrected 26 July 2026. This replaces the earlier animation, which had two faults readers flagged: the year labels drifted out of sync as it played, so some fires appeared earlier in the timeline than they occurred — the 2023 Donnie Creek complex and the northeastern Alberta fires of that season were showing under a 2022 label — and the cumulative counter was computed on a flawed geographic basis. Both are fixed. Every perimeter is now keyed to its source agency's own year field, clipped to the Statistics Canada BC + Alberta boundary, and measured on an equal-area projection. The 2025 season has also been added. The closing total moves from 18.36 M to 20.34 M hectares — see the methodology note below for what drove the change.
What the animation shows
Every red polygon is the official perimeter of a single fire as recorded by the agency that mapped it — the BC Wildfire Service for British Columbia, Alberta Wildfire for Alberta. These are the provinces' own authoritative perimeter files rather than the national compilation, which lags them. Bright yellow indicates fires actively burning in the current month of the timeline; dim red indicates fires that have already been contained but whose burn footprint stays visible on the cumulative map. The base layer is NASA Blue Marble true-colour satellite imagery with terrain shading.
The annotation in the top-right corner is the cumulative total hectares burned across BC and Alberta from January 2000 onward. It runs:
| Year-end | Cumulative ha burned (BC + AB, since 2000) |
|---|---|
| 2002 | 0.68 M |
| 2009 | 2.21 M |
| 2015 | 5.21 M |
| 2017 | 7.11 M |
| 2018 | 8.51 M |
| 2021 | 10.19 M |
| 2023 | 16.93 M |
| 2024 | 18.75 M |
| 2025 | 20.34 M |
The 2023 jump — 6.47 M hectares in a single year, just under a third of the entire 26-year total — is by far the largest annual addition in the record. Most of that burn was in BC's interior and the boreal margins of northern Alberta, with secondary footprints around the Northwest Territories border and around the Lytton / Kamloops corridor.
The split either side of 2020 is the finding. The first twenty years of the record, 2000 through 2019, produced 9.25 M hectares, or 45% of the total. The six years since produced 11.09 M, or 55%.
Two different measurements appear on this page and they are not interchangeable. The cumulative line above is a geographic figure: every mapped fire perimeter, dissolved so overlapping fires in the same year are not counted twice, clipped to the Statistics Canada BC and Alberta boundary, and measured on an equal-area projection. Season totals quoted elsewhere come from each province's own official statistics, which are compiled on a different basis — Alberta's, for instance, exclude Wood Buffalo National Park, which is federally administered. The geographic figure is the higher of the two for that reason, and neither is a correction of the other.
Why this matters
Three structural points the animation makes visible that summary statistics tend to flatten:
- The acceleration is recent and abrupt. The 26-year cumulative line is not linear. Most of the total burn area on the map — 55% — accumulated in the last six years, 2020 through 2025. The first twenty years of the record contributed the other 45%.
- The 2023 season was a step-change, not a trend continuation. Both provinces set their all-time records in the same summer. British Columbia burned 2.84 M ha, close to double its previous worst season (2018, ~1.35 M ha), and Alberta burned 2.21 M ha, more than double its own previous worst and roughly ten times its five-year average. The animation makes the discontinuity visible.
- The two provinces usually do not burn together, which is what makes 2023 stand out. Across the 26-year record their annual burn areas barely track each other at all. Alberta's worst seasons before 2023 were 2011, 2012 and 2019, all of which were quiet in BC; BC's were 2017, 2018 and 2021, all of which were quiet in Alberta. Strip out 2023 and the correlation between the two provinces is effectively zero. 2023 is the only year in the record when both burned catastrophically at once.
What the animation can't tell you
Three things this single visualization does not address:
- Cause attribution. The provincial fire records carry a lightning-vs-human cause code for each fire, but the animation does not colour fires by cause. Lightning-caused share has been roughly stable around 50–60 % across the window; the absolute number of human-caused fires has not grown as fast as the burn area.
- Severity vs extent. A fire that burns through old-growth boreal forest at high intensity has very different ecological and carbon-emission consequences than a fire that burns through young regrowth or grass. The map plots area, not severity. Severity classifications (from the Canadian Fire Severity Index) are a separate dataset.
- What the comparable picture looks like for the rest of Canada. Quebec's 2023 season was historically large but is not in this map. Saskatchewan's 2024 season ditto. We will publish the all-Canada version of this visualization once the 1972–2024 NFDB rebuild we are running finishes.
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