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Wildland fire prevention and mitigation is of mutual interest to both government and the forest industry. In 1989, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry introduced the Woods Modification Guidelines that provided rules on how forestry operations should be modified based on local fire danger conditions. Those guidelines were replaced by the Modifying Industrial Operations Protocol (MIOP) in 2008. One objective of MIOP is to allow forestry operations to be done safely for as long as possible as the fire danger increases. We investigate the impacts of these sets of regulations on the frequency of industrial forestry-caused (IDF) wildland fires in the province of Ontario, Canada. Data from 1976 to 2019 are analyzed. A case-crossover study finds no evidence to suggest that MIOP's greater flexibility in operating hours has increased the probability of IDF fire occurrences. This result indicates that MIOP's regulations have had the desired effect of allowing longer working hours on days with heightened fire risk without adding to the seasonal wildland fire load. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Industrial forestry operations in Ontario, Canada, may be restricted to reduce the risk of wildland fires. This is currently done according to the Modifying Industrial Operations Protocol (MIOP), which was implemented in 2008 as a replacement for the Woods Modification Guidelines that had been in place since 1989. One of MIOP's objectives is to limit the negative impact or damage caused by fires ignited by industrial forestry operations. Aims: Treating the incremental growth between discovery and final sizes as a measure of suppression effectiveness, we aimed to characterise and contrast growth distributions for three successive time periods using data spanning 1976–2019 on Crown forest areas of Ontario. Methods: Stratifying by first responding group (Ontario Ministry vs forestry personnel), we tested for evidence of changes in the growth distribution using the Kruskal–Wallis and Mann–Whitney U tests. Key results: We found iterative improvements between successive time periods (Pre-Woods, then Woods Guidelines, then MIOP) in the growth distribution of fires first responded to by forestry personnel. Conclusions: MIOP appears to be successfully limiting the negative impact of industrial forestry fires while increasing operational flexibility relative to the Woods Modification Guidelines. Implications: MIOP has been implemented in a manner that still encourages safe operations while not contradicting this objective. Ontario's Modifying Industrial Operations Protocol aims to limit wildland fire risks associated with forestry operations. We empirically investigated how the distribution of incremental growth between discovery and final sizes of industrial forestry-caused fires have changed over time, finding evidence suggesting that fires tend to grow less under current regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]