I'll start and allow Gilles to add.
We work in co-operation with several partners who really are leading some of the monitoring on that. As was stated, we have developed a mountain pine beetle management plan for the park that involves several specific objectives related to the mountain pine beetle.
First, we're using prescribed fire. Where we have looked at and analyzed the forest stand structure and we know there's a more diverse forest stand—not all mature and old, but a more natural distribution of forest age—we're using fire as our number one tool to increase ecological integrity and manage the stand.
Prescribed burns are planned in several areas. To give you a few examples of those, one big area is the Fiddle five complex. The aim there is that it's a multi-year program to use prescribed burn in order to bring the stand age to a more normal distribution, which would then give the forest more resilience and enable it to withstand the bug infestation. That's one tool. It's really focused in the Athabasca Valley.
We're also doing what we call “level 1” treatments, which are single-stand removals of infected trees. Again, we're looking specifically at leading edges of certain zones. The analysis that's being done is really looking at where the minimum effort can achieve the greatest result for managing the species. Using mapping and various tools, those interventions are being made in specific areas.
The third is a broader patch removal using mechanized equipment. The use of that particular method is somewhat limited by the geography of the area. Where we can do that, often adjacent to towns and things like that, we are taking those actions.
One of the challenges we face now is that with the past practice of forest suppression, using fire as a natural way to manage does challenge us, because forest fuels are quite high. We're often employing a two-stage effect, where we're doing some mechanical removal to reduce the risk of fire so that we can then move in and use fire on the landscape. Sometimes it's a single treatment, and sometimes it will be multiple.