Bigger, hotter wildfires are turning Canada’s vast boreal forest into a significant new source of climate-changing greenhouse gases, scientists say.

The shift, which may have already happened, could force firefighters to change how they battle northern blazes, said Merritt Turetsky, an ecologist at the University of Guelph and co-author of a paper that appeared in the science journal Nature on Wednesday.

“It’s making it much more difficult for us to target those reductions in human emissions because, all of a sudden, we have all these unaccounted-for sources.”

The boreal forest, a band of green that stretches over six provinces and two territories, has long been a storehouse of carbon.

Although fires sweep through as often as every 70 years, much carbon remains in the soil and slowly builds up — up to 75 kilograms of carbon per cubic metre, some of it thousands of years old.

But with climate change, fires are becoming more frequent, larger and more intense.