- Title:
-
Pyrogenic Panic or Perceptive Planning for a New Fire World? Fire and Water Quality
- Date:
- September 2008
- Organisations
- BCRC
- Authors:
- Malcolm Gill, Alan Wade
- Location:
- Australia, Australia
Overview
The International Bushfire Research Conference 2008 - incorporating The 15th annual AFAC Conference, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
The changes projected for the occurrence and intensity of fires have considerable implications for the management of water catchments in south-eastern Australia. Should response to change be based on expedience or on a rational basis, such as adaptive management?
Experience following the 2003 fires, and previously, have shown that water quality, in particular, can decline rapidly after catchment-wide fires. If such fires were to become more frequent and intense (i.e. fire regimes change), then episodes of soil erosion would increase and water quality would decline. As a response to this, catchment managers in forested areas may choose to increase prescribed burning to reduce the chances of catchment-wide, intense, fires or upgrade suppression operations.
While the effectiveness of these measures can be tested in an adaptive management system, the prescribed-burning alternatives, in particular, are so numerous, and the time between catchment-wide fires so extended, that attention to experiences in other catchments and a strong and appropriate research agenda are needed to supplement it.
