Wildfire causes in Canada
Canadian wildfire agencies do not publish one uniform cause vocabulary. FireRadar therefore preserves the exact suspected-cause wording supplied by each connected direct official source and measures where cause data is present, rather than forcing every record into a national lightning-versus-human chart.
Current non-extinguished direct-official incident records in the FireRadar map snapshot.
Records where the responsible source currently supplies a non-empty suspected-cause value.
Coverage of current active records, not a statement about final cause attribution for the season.
Latest source update represented here: Aug 17, 2026, 7:47 p.m..
Cause reporting by province and territory
A blank cause is kept blank. A source label is kept in that source’s own vocabulary. The table therefore shows both reporting coverage and the exact labels currently appearing, so differences between agencies remain visible instead of being hidden by aggressive normalization.
| Jurisdiction | Active records | Cause reported | Coverage | Current source labels |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Northwest Territories | 213 | 213 | 100% | Natural, Lightning (174) · Natural (38) · Human Caused, Camp Fire Abandoned (1) |
| British Columbia | 128 | 128 | 100% | Lightning (107) · Person (17) · Unknown (4) |
| Ontario | 124 | 114 | 91.9% | LIGHTNING (114) |
| Quebec | 24 | 24 | 100% | Natural / lightning (24) |
| Yukon | 24 | 0 | 0% | No cause value is currently supplied in FireRadar's direct-official active records for this jurisdiction. |
| Saskatchewan | 17 | 0 | 0% | No cause value is currently supplied in FireRadar's direct-official active records for this jurisdiction. |
| Manitoba | 5 | 5 | 100% | Natural (5) |
| Alberta | 3 | 3 | 100% | Human (2) · Under Investigation (1) |
| New Brunswick | 3 | 3 | 100% | Human (2) · Lightning (Final) (1) |
| Nova Scotia | 2 | 0 | 0% | No cause value is currently supplied in FireRadar's direct-official active records for this jurisdiction. |
What this page can and cannot tell you
Suspected is not necessarily final. Operational incident feeds can use preliminary cause labels while investigation continues. A final annual dataset may later classify the same event differently.
Missing does not mean unknown by definition. It means FireRadar’s current direct source record does not presently expose a usable cause value.
Source vocabularies are not interchangeable. Terms such as Person, Human, Natural, Lightning, Under Investigation, or agency-specific subcategories are not silently merged here.
Why there is no national lightning-vs-human pie chart
A visually simple national percentage would require assumptions about missing records and incompatible agency taxonomies. FireRadar will only add normalized national cause trends when the underlying official historical datasets support a documented, reproducible mapping.
Related FireRadar resources
Download current incident records and review public field definitions.
Understand why operational status terminology also differs by jurisdiction.
See how FireRadar separates current observations from official historical datasets.
Thank you for using and supporting FireRadar.
— The FireRadar team