2015 Canadian wildfires were a series of wildfires across Canada and Alaska in July 2015 which spread smoke across most of North America. Over two hundred fires were ablaze across British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.
Tens of thousand of people had been evacuated and more than 1,900,000 hectares (4,700,000 acres) of forest had burned. Fire-fighters from Mexico, Western Australia, and New Zealand were sent to assist. The Canadian military also fought the fires. Since the smoke was so dense, warnings had been given across central and Western Canada; additionally, parts of the western United States were also issued air advisories because of the amount of smoke. Wildfires have burned one million hectares (2.4 million acres) in Saskatchewan in the past year according to statistics posted on the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. The words people have used to describe this natural disaster is "extreme, unprecedented, and historic. A majority of the ecosystem where the fire had been burning consists of boreal forests. Circumstances for catastrophic fires were created as a result of the fuel buildup starting in the 1950s caused fire inhibition. This outcome created a change in the landscape-age mosaic. Initially, this fuel buildup was created for closed canopy ecosystems such as the Pinus ponderosa located in the western United States.