We compiled maps of bushfires and prescribed burns in southern Australia from 1980 to 2021 to see how fire activity is changing habitat for 129 threatened species such as mountain pygmy possums.
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For a century fire ecologists have worked to decipher a complex question - what does a normal wildfire year look like in the West? That s a hard question to answer for many reasons, but new resea
Strange burn: New research identifies unique patterns in Utah wildfires phys.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from phys.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Aim: Megafire events generate immediate concern for wildlife and human well-being, but their broader ecological impacts likely extend beyond individual species and single fire events. In the first mechanistic study of fire effects focussed on ecosystems, we aimed to assess the sensitivity and exposure of ecosystems to multiple fire-related threats, placing impacts in the context of changing fire regimes and their interactions with other threats. Location: Southern and eastern Australia. Time period: 2019–2020. Major species studied: Australian ecosystems. Methods: We defined 15 fire-related threats to ecosystems based on mechanisms associated with: (a) direct effects of fire regime components; (b) interactions between fire and physical environmental processes; (c) effects of fire on biological interactions; and (d) interactions between fire and human activity. We estimated the sensitivity and exposure of a sample of 92 ecosystem types to each threat type based on published relationsh
Abstract
Extreme fire seasons characterised by very large mega-fires have demonstrably increased area burnt across forested regions globally. However, the effect of extreme fire seasons on fire severity, a measure of fire impacts on ecosystems, remains unclear. Very large wildfires burnt an unprecedented area of temperate forest, woodland and shrubland across south-eastern Australia in 2019/2020, providing an opportunity to examine the impact of extreme fires on fire severity patterns. We developed an atlas of wildfire severity across south-eastern Australia between 1988 and 2020 to test (a) whether the 2019/2020 fire season was more severe than previous fire seasons, and (b) if the proportion of high-severity fire within the burn extent (HSp) increases with wildfire size and annual area burnt. We demonstrate that the 2019/2020 wildfires in south-eastern Australia were generally greater in extent but not proportionally more severe than previous fires, owing to constant scaling bet