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Your fireplace and wood stove are major drivers of deforestation

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If you burn wood to heat your home, you may not realize how many trees are consumed every year by this choice. It's often difficult to see this since most of us have wood delivered in trucks loaded with smaller and sometimes split pieces. On Gabriola Island, our consumption of wood is the equivalent of 545 logging trucks/year of trees, and this consumes 55 Ha (136 acres) of mature forest every year. Much of this wood is imported from woodlots on Vancouver Island. If parked end-to-end, these 545 trucks (21.5m in length) would be 11.75 km long - almost the length of the island. Here's the math and the hyperlinked references to support these calculations. Forests in B.C. are relatively productive compared to other parts of the world.  A Ha of mature forest yields on average 400 cubic meters of wood.   Not all of this wood can be used as firewood but we'll use this number since data on actual amounts of usable wood are difficult to come by. A lower number of usable quantities...
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Forest fire smoke finally hits Gabriola Island

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Our PurpleAir network of realtime air quality monitors is starting to show the first signs of air pollution from the forest fires in the interior of BC. The air quality can change dramatically and quickly as we saw in Kamloops these past two weeks. Keep an eye on our live sensor map by clicking here .  There is no provincial air quality monitoring on the island so our citizen science initiative through this non-profit is the place to go for information. We can see the trend line going up rapidly this afternoon around 3PM. These are the current sensor readings for a sister network in Kamloops. Anything over 25 micrograms/cubic meter for a 24 hour averaging period is considered unacceptably high.
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Still doubt the accuracy of low cost air quality monitors?

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Today, local forest fire events have triggered extremely high air quality readings in Kamloops BC. For more than two years the BC Ministry of Environment and others have been raising doubts about the quality and accuracy of citizen science networks like PurpleAir. They have issued statements to media, city councils, and other branches of government calling this equipment cheap smoke detectors that are Made in China. It's an inconvenient truth for them when smoke problems catch them with their pants down. Today the Air Quality Health Index lagged several hours in telling people in the community about the real risk. They had their index at a low risk level of 3 out of 10 when it was clear from our readings beginning at 3AM that this was a dramatic underestimate. The same thing happened all of last Summer in the region with incredibly high levels of risk to the population that were systematically downplayed. Here's (yet again) proof that these devices work - and they work ...
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