Fighting fire with fire not the only way

IBTimes (Australia): Action taken to reduce the impact of wildfires may not be protecting houses or native animals and plants, according to leading experts. The warning comes from a team of fire scientists, land managers and ecologists who call for a new, rational approach to making decisions about fire management in an article published in the journal Conservation Letters this week.

Fire ecologist and lead author Dr Don Driscoll from The Australian National University says that although nature conservation is often a policy goal of fire managers, protecting built assets usually takes precedence in practice. The researchers question whether widespread fuel-reduction burning is as protective as it is widely believed to be. They report modelling that shows it is not the total area burnt that really matters, but the location of the fuel-reduction burns.

"It seems that burning within 100 metres or so of the urban fringe can have a strong protective effect, but randomly located burns have very little or no protective effect, even when a very high proportion of the landscape is burnt annually," Dr Driscoll says. "Very frequent burning - say, more than once every five or ten years in eucalypt forests and woodlands - can eliminate native species from the area. So, minimising the area that is frequently burnt is a win for biodiversity. If that frequently burnt area is strategically located next to housing, then it is likely to have a protective effect."

Dr Driscoll and his colleagues have created a framework for agencies to make better decisions about fire management. Critical to their approach is identifying a full range of management options and then obtaining evidence that could evaluate how effective those options are for asset protection and conservation goals….

A river of smoke more than 25 kilometers wide flowed southeast toward the Tasman Sea from fires burning in the Great Dividing Range Mountains in Victoria, Australia, on December 5, 2006. Shot from NASA