- Title:
-
Fire Interval Sequences to Aid in Site Selection for Biodiversity Studies: Mapping the fire regime
- Date:
- June 2006
- Organisations
- BCRC
- Authors:
- Wittkuhn, R.S., Hamilton, T. and McCaw, L.
- Location:
- Australia, WA, Australia
Overview
Bushfire Conference 2006 - Brisbane, 6–9 June 2006Life In A Fire-Prone Environment: Translating Science Into Practice
Determining the impact of fire regimes on biota is often limited by the lack of good knowledge about fire history: where have fires occurred, how big were they, and at what time of the year and with what intensity did they burn? On the other hand, where fire history has been well documented, the complexity of this information can be daunting.
In this paper, we show how a simplification of the fire history data into fire interval sequences can provide a basis for studying the impact of contemporary fire history on biodiversity. Our study centred on an area of 50 000 ha northeast of Walpole, Western Australia, that was all burnt in the fire season of 2002/03. We considered fire interval to be the most important factor in determining species composition. We categorized fire intervals as short (≤ 5 y), moderate (6–9 y) or long (≥ 10 y), based on information on primary juvenile periods and likely fire return times. For each polygon in the FHD, short intervals were assigned a ‘1’, moderate a ‘2’ and long a ‘3’. This resulted in a sequence of numbers (made up of 1s, 2s and 3s) that indicated the pattern of fire intervals in reverse time series for every given area. For biological studies, successive short fire intervals (sequences of numbers that contained ‘11’) and consecutive long fire intervals (sequences containing ‘33’) were considered likely to be the most influential on species composition (e.g. localized extinction of serotinous obligate seeders).
This paper details the methods used to derive the fire interval sequences, and how these were used to aid site selection for investigations of fire regime on biota.
