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Tree hollows are an important landscape resource used by fauna for shelter, nesting, and predator avoidance. In fire-prone landscapes, wildfire and climate may impact hollow dynamics; however, assessments of their concurrent impacts are rare. We conducted a field survey at 80 sites in the Sydney Basin bioregion (Australia) to understand how fire frequency, fire severity, mean annual temperature, and mean annual precipitation concurrently impacted the site-density of small- (<5 cm entry>width), medium- (5–10 cm entry width) and large-size (>10 cm entry width) tree hollows and tree ba...

In the spring and summer of 2019–2020, the ‘Black Summer’ bushfires burned more than 97 000 km2 of predominantly Eucalyptus dominated forest habitat in eastern Australia. The Black Summer bushfires prompted great concern that many species had been imperilled by the fires. Here, we investigate the effects that fire severity had on the habitat and abundance of a cool climate lizard Eulamprus tympanum that was identified as a species of concern because 37% of its habitat was burnt in the Black Summer bushfires. We quantified habitat structure and the abundance of E. tympanum at sites which ...

The iconic Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis) is a critically endangered Australian conifer and one of the world’s rarest trees with only 46 mature individuals remaining in the wild. The species is regarded as a “living fossil” and was discovered on the brink of extinction following a natural historical decline. While its discovery has enabled crucial intervention for its long-term conservation, it has also created novel threats. Wollemia nobilis is facing extinction in the wild due to its highly restricted distribution, extremely small population size, and ongoing impacts from exotic patho...

Fire events in south-eastern Australia are increasing in frequency and severity resulting from climate change. The existing fire adaptation research for Australian flora has focussed on fire adapted lineages. However, it important to understand the dynamics of fire vulnerable species and the mechanisms by which they persist fire prone environments. Mistletoes are an example of a fire vulnerable species that lacks the ability to resprout or reseed, relying on recolonisation following fire. This thesis furthers fire ecology by establishing a relationship between fire severity and the survival of...

Bushfire occurrences will likely be exacerbated by climate change, thus requiring a model to forecast and manage their impacts. However, a robust bushfire model requires new proxies that can infer fire severity responses to past climate variability. A key test to the viability of new fire proxies is whether they record fire severity in the affected soil. We address this by testing Attenuated Total Reflectance- Fourier Transform Infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy and boron (B) isotopes in soil clay fractions from Yengo National Park, southeastern Australia, as proxies for bushfire severity. The i...