- Title:
-
Contribution of Prescribed Fire to the Management of Conservation Lands and Multiple-use Forests in Western Australia
- Date:
- August 2007
- Organisations
- Ecological Society of Australia
- Authors:
- L. McCaw
- Location:
- Australia, WA, Australia
Overview
From Delegates Handbook:
Western Australia is a large and diverse state that extends from the semi-arid tropics to the Southern Ocean. Most terrestrial ecosystems are prone to periodic fire, except those naturally devoid of vegetation cover or significantly altered by grazing and other land uses. Prescribed fire is an important management tool on public lands including conservation reserves, multiple-use state forests and extensive areas of unallocated crown land in the remoter parts of the state. Prescribed fire is used for a wide range of purposes including: to reduce the intensity, scale and severity of unplanned fires; to provide a range of post-fire seral stages in the landscape; and to regenerate plant communities that respond to fire-related cues including heat, smoke and mineral ashbeds. In the forests of the Mediterranean south-west, prescribed burning has been practiced at a landscape scale for more than 5 decades and makes an important contribution to limiting the intensity of unplanned summer fires.
This has proven to be of critical importance when many fires are burning under severe weather conditions. There is growing recognition that prescribed burning also has an important role in limiting the scale of unplanned fires in the vast landscapes of the interior and north where altered fire regimes are contributing to declining populations of some plants and animals. The ready availability of high quality satellite remote sensing has been instrumental in raising awareness of the scale of fires in remote areas and in understanding the relationships between fire spread, landform and vegetation, and past fire patterns. Better knowledge of the effects of spatial fire patterns on biodiversity should lead to refinement of prescribed burning techniques. Recent climatic trends for Western Australia are consistent with projections from most models under enhanced greenhouse warming. Climate change is likely to influence future fire regimes through a number of mechanisms including changes in seasonal patterns of plant growth, altered patterns of lightning ignition, and interaction with extreme events such as frost, drought and tropical cyclones.
