PRE & POST ECOLOGICAL BURNS EFFECTS ON WILDLIFE

Since Australia became the driest continent on Earth, fires have been a frequent occurrence. Many floral species then evolved to cope with such an environment that some seeds require fire, smoke or scarification to germinate.
Australian Aborigines practised burns for the past 60 thousand years and only enhanced the transformation of the ecosystem.

However, the introduction of invasive flora species, namely grasses, which were brought in mostly from Africa were to feed the livestock industry. These grasses, however, dispersed beyond the cattle stations and began to overtake the bush. Not having large herbivores to graze it, the grasses grow, seed and die every year, creating an incredibly thick, sometimes a few-feet-high grass layer which is very flammable and burns extremely hot. This enhances the threat of devastating bushfires.

Property owners are then encouraged to conduct ecological burns within their properties; however, the lack of knowledge, understanding, and sometimes even care, combined with extremely weak government policies, means that many inexperienced property owners create very hot, uncontrolled and unsupervised fires that have a devastating effect on the environment.

The Australian biodiversity has suffered greatly due to these rogue fires; many species have gone extinct or critically declined in numbers, such as the Coochin Hills Gravillea (Grevillea hodgei), which is listed as CRITICALLY ENDANGERED on the IUCN Red List.