Quantifying potential effect of 2019 fires on national parks and vegetation in South‐East Queensland

Abstract

Summary Fire is a major type of ecological disturbance shaping plant communities and species distributions. Fires in the spring and summer of 2019/2020 in Australia burnt large areas where this type of disturbance was rare in the past, including in the South‐East Queensland region. To assess the potential impacts of these fires, online GIS data layers were used to map where the fires occurred and which protected areas, plant communities and threatened plants were likely burnt. Based on clustering of Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite sensor fire points, 3% (240,000 ha) of the region may have burnt including 107,606 ha of National Parks, sections of 18 Broad Vegetation Groups and 74 Regional Ecosystems and potential habitat of 74 threatened plant species. This included 16% of wet open forests and 13% of rainforests. The results provide preliminary insights into the potential scale of the fires and impact on biodiversity from mapping based on online data, but we also that more detailed mapping including of fire intensity and perimeter combined with ground truthing and ongoing monitoring would be required to better understand changes in fire regimes in the region.

Analyzing and Leveraging Social Media Disaster Communication of Natural Hazards: Community Sentiment and Messaging Regarding the Australian 2019/20 Bushfires

“…This overlap is explained by the preeminent agricultural characteristics of the region and the terrible impact the bushfires had on domestic livestock. This also reflects the discourse in the broadcast media and among scientific experts relating to the impacts of the fires on wildlife [40][41][42].…”

“…Based on prior research, it was not surprising that crisis, emergency and support for recovery are key themes and that concepts including support and people also feature in the messages. There was also a focus on the impacts of the bushfire on the ecology of the affected region, with animals and wildlife featured in the results, and the impacts of bushfires on Australian wildlife were widely reported [40][41][42]. Thus, social media was mostly used to gain situation awareness of the current state of the disaster, as well as for selforganization of peer-to-peer activities, such as volunteering and raising funds to support victims of the disaster and recovery efforts.…”

“…This study involved the social media messages relating to the series of unprecedented high-severity bushfire events in Australia that began in late 2019 and continued until early 2020 named the Black Summer Fires. These fires impacted more than 7 million hectares of forest and woodland in eastern Australia and had a significant impact on fauna and flora as well as human life and property, as 33 people lost their lives and more than 3000 homes were destroyed [37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44].…”

Lack of fire rather than pollinator absence may drive population decline in the critically endangered

“…Importantly, this should be followed by a fire-free interval of perhaps 10 years to allow maturation and restoration of the canopy seed store. Smith et al (2021) highlighted how short intervals between fires threaten the ability of this species to mature and produce seed in Queensland. However, at the Coorabakh populations, lack of fire, at least initially, appears to be constraining replenishment of the population, but fires in quick succession, which restricts seed development, will remain a threat to this species.…”

Frequently Burnt Subtropical Eucalypt Forest Is More Resilient to Wildfire Than Rarely Burnt Forest

“…Large areas of eastern Australia were burnt in unplanned, high-intensity wildfires between August 2019 and February 2020 (Adams et al, 2020;Collins et al, 2021;Smith et al, 2021;Baker et al, 2022). High-intensity wildfires can damage the canopy and kill eucalypt trees which normally survive lower-intensity fires (Williams et al, 2020).…”