A Half Century of Change in Australian Fire Ecology:

Personal Glimpses, 1960 to 2010

Malcolm Gill talking with people about the effects of fire at a public excursion run by the Victorian Dept of Sustainability and Environment in south-western Victoria, May 2010.                   Image: Dawn Stan.

A. Malcolm Gill

Visiting Fellow,

Fenner School of Environment and Society,

Australian National University,

ACTON, ACT 0200, Australia

In 1960, the year in which the Ecological Society of Australia was born, no National Parks in southern Australia had a management plan, let alone a fire management plan, as far as I can ascertain. There were no computers, GISs, GPSs or satellite imagery. The spatially-explicit fire histories that are so vital for the understanding of the effects of fire in the landscape were short, crude, or non-existent in south-eastern Australia. There was a crude map of the widespread, socially disastrous Victorian fires of 1939, but it was a tiny unrecorded Victorian agricultural fire with a very high fuel load which made a lasting impression on me.

It was about 50 years ago, when I was a second-year agricultural student at the University of Melbourne, in our field-year at Dookie Agricultural College in northern Victoria. There, a field fire intruded into my life for the first time. A haystack burned down. When I wrote home about it, by snail mail of course, I received a prompt reply from my earth-scientist father – it probably took more than a week – that measurement of the amount of black glass in the footprint of the haystack would be appreciated as it would give some idea of the opal phytolith content of the hay: these microscopic spicules of silica were being studied by Dr George Baker (see Baker and Baker 1963). This was my first brush with fire research, albeit ‘fire research’ in a broad sense, and the beginning of surprises that fire would present over the next half century. Fires have had a habit of revealing fascinating effects and continue to do so to the present day, e.g. on wine quality (Kennison et al. 2009) and on mercury content of fish (Kelly et al. 2006).

A major feature of the sixties was the publication of the applied fire-behaviour research of McArthur (1962). This enabled burning in southern forests to take place in a more scientific way - rather than just ‘burning off’ - but it was a particularly controversial practice, arguably even more so than today. Was this because of a lack of understanding by the critics, a difference in perceived assets or perhaps both? Was it exacerbated by the possibility of prescribed burning using aerial ignition (Baxter et al. 1966)?

From a scientific point of view, studies on the place of fire in forests were active in the 1960s, particularly in Tasmania and in Victoria: my higher degree supervisor David Ashton was busy in the tall mountain ash forests of central Victoria. Mountain Ash, Eucalyptus regnans, is a prime exemplar of the effects of fire regimes on species persistence or local extinction (Ashton 1981).

It was also in the 1960s that theoretical fire ecology may be declared to have started in Australia with the enduring and stimulating concepts of Jackson (1968). He schematically portrayed the probabilistic place of fires in the landscapes of Tasmania in the pages of the Proceedings of the Ecological Society of Australia.  Since then we have had various conceptual advances such as the formalisation of fire regimes (Gill 1975) and plant functional types (Noble and Slatyer 1981) and the integration of the effects of fire regimes through increasingly sophisticated computer simulations based on abstract (Cary et al. 2009) or real landscapes (King et al. 2006; Bradstock et al. 2009).

In the last few years, especially, fire ecology has delved into the effects of climate change and atmospheric change much more deeply (Williams et al. 2009). Fuels, fire weather, fire behaviour and fire effects have all been considered and remain a prime topic of investigation. These topics inter-relate and need to be considered in an appropriate ecosystem context. Thus, there is necessarily a strong synergy between ecology, in general, and fire ecology, in particular: knowledge of organisms in relation to their ‘usual’ inter-fire environment (‘ecology’) sets the scene for investigation of the effects of events like fires, and regimes like fire regimes.

Fire ecology since 2003 has been boosted in Australia by the funding of a Bushfire Co-operative Research Centre. There, the social-science of bushfires has been a major theme accompanying the formal recognition of coupled human-environment systems in the general literature (Dearing et al. 2006). If there was any doubt about this coupling – and it is unlikely to be doubted by fire ecologists, most of whom have a strong management impetus in their research – then official Inquiries into recent major bushfires and their social impact, especially the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission (Teague et al. 2010), should dispel it.

While there have been major advances in fire ecology over the past 50 years it would be a mistake to think that gaining an understanding of fires and their effects is a simple matter. It would be a mistake to think that we understand the effects of fires on Australian vascular plants – let alone vertebrate animals, invertebrates, fungi etc. It would also be a mistake to consider that our atmospheric composition is static and has no effect on fuels, that fire histories will not change as we increasingly try to domesticate them, that people will not dominate the planet more and more, and that the work of fire ecology, let alone that of ecological science in general - represented by the Ecological Society of Australia (ESA) - is complete. I am sure that there are phenomena, concepts and theories in fire ecology still awaiting discovery – aided and abetted by rigorous empirical research and accurate fire atlases.

Happy Birthday ESA: here’s to the next 50 years!

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Dr Geoff Cary for his generous support in the work place and for commenting on a draft of this contribution.

References cited

Ashton, D.H. (1981). Fire in tall open-forests. In A.M. Gill, R.H. Groves and I.R. Noble (eds) Fire and the Australian Biota. Pp. 339-366. Australian Academy of Science, Canberra.

Baker, G. and Baker, A.A. (1963). Hay-silica glass from Gnarkeet Western Victoria. Memoirs of the National Museum of Victoria 26, 21-45.

Baxter, J.R., Packham, D.R. and Peet, G.B. (1966). Control Burning from Aircraft. CSIRO Chemical Research Laboratories, Melbourne. 26p.

Bradstock, R., Davies, I., Price, O. and Cary, G. (2009). Effects of Climate Change on Bushfire Threats to Biodiversity, Ecosystem Processes and People in the Sydney Region. Final Report to the New South Wales Department of Environment and Climate Change: Climate Change and Adaptation Research Project 050831.

Cary, G.J., Flannigan, M.D., Keane, R.F., Bradstock, R.A., Davies, I.D., Lenihan, J.M., Li, C., Logan, K.A. and Parsons, R.A. (2009). Relative importance of fuel management, ignition management and weather for area burned: evidence from five landscape-fire-succession models. International Journal of Wildland Fire 18, 147-156.

Dearing, J.A., Battarbee, R.W., Dikau, R., Larocque, I and Oldfield, F. (2006). Human-environment interactions: towards synthesis and simulation. Reg. Environment Change 6, 115-123.

Gill, A.M. (1975). Fire and the Australian flora: a review. Australian Forestry 38, 4-25.

Jackson, W.D. (1968). Fire, air, water and earth - an elemental ecology of Tasmania. Proceedings of the Ecological Society of Australia 3, 9-16.

Kelly, E.N., Schindler, D.W., St Louis, V.L., Donald, D.B. and Vladicka, K.E. (2006). Forest fire increases mercury accumulation by fishes via food web restructuring and increased mercury inputs. PNAS 102 (51), 19380-19385.

Kennison, K.R., Wilkinson, K.L., Pollnitz, A.P., Williams, H.G. and Gibberd, M.R. (2009). Effect of timing and duration of grapevine exposure to smoke on the composition and sensory properties of wine. Australian Journal of Grape and Wine Research 15, 228-237.

King, K.J., Cary, G.J., Bradstock, R.A., Chapman, J., Pyrke, A. and Marsden-Smedley, J.B. (2006). Simulation of prescribed burning strategies in south-west Tasmania, Australia: effects on unplanned fires, fire regimes, and ecological management values. International Journal of Wildland Fire 15, 527-540.

McArthur, A.G. (1962). Control Burning in Eucalypt Forests. Commonwealth Forestry and Timber Bureau Leaflet 80. Government Printer, Canberra. 31p.

Noble, I.R. and Slatyer, R.O. (1981). Concepts and models of succession in vascular plant communities subject to recurrent fire.  In A.M. Gill, R.H. Groves and I.R. Noble (eds) Fire and the Australian Biota pp. 311-335.  Australian Academy of Science, Canberra.

Teague, B., McLeod, R. and Pascoe, S. (2010). 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission. Final Report. Victorian Government, Melbourne. 930p.

Williams, R.J., Bradstock, R.A., Cary, G.J., Enright, N., Gill, A.M., Liedloff, A.C., Lucas, C., Whelan, R.J., Andersen, A.N., Bowman, D.M.J.S., Cook, G.D., Hennessy, K.J. and York, A.  (2009). Interactions between Climate Change, Fire Regimes and Biodiversity of Australia – A Preliminary Assessment. Australian Department of Climate Change, Canberra.