Underpinnings of fire management for biodiversity conservation in ...

Fire and adaptive management
vi
Preface
Nowhere in Australia are bushfire matters more contentious than in south-eastern Australia, where
the twin tragedies of the destruction of economic assets and the loss of human life are graphically
presented by the media, along with dramatic pictures of high intensity fires. What should be done
about such fires?
Media reports implicitly highlight the question, ‘What are our assets?’ Human life and property are
major societal assets. Pastures and stock are rural assets. Native plants and animals, catchments and
infrastructure are also assets. Some assets are affected by one event – houses, human lives, trees and
individual animals – others by a sequence of fires, especially species of plants and animals. Thus fires
affect a diverse array of natural and societal assets, individually and collectively.
Topics within the discipline of bushfire science and management are numerous and complex. If the
knowledge needed for making informed decisions had already been acquired, and if the conceptual
understanding necessary for informed application of knowledge had already been gained, then
matters of contention would appear to be readily resolved. However, there is still much to learn
and the debate involves wider matters, such as: government priorities and budgets; what different
groups in our society consider to be assets (a reflection of their values); the methods and speed of
fire suppression; land-use planning; the nature and speed of recovery after major events; and how
landscapes and their components respond to fires.
Responses by authorities and landowners to these issues usually involve intervention in the landscape,
through fire suppression and fuel manipulation. These are inextricably linked with the land use
being considered. A farmer’s approach to fuel management is likely to be quite different to that of
a conservation manager, or that of an urban-interface dweller, because of the differences in assets
being considered and the resources available to them.
Given that the range of bushfire issues is so large, no short publication such as this can address all of
them. Here, the purpose is to present and explain some of the ideas underpinning fire management
for the conservation of the indigenous organisms (biodiversity) present in public conservation reserves.
This may involve continual attempts to eliminate exotic, naturalised species. Thus the emphasis
here is the effect of fire and fuel management on native plant and animal species in reserves; such
management takes place within the general context of the protection of human life and property.
Fire (and fuel) management is a difficult and contentious practice. Fires can escape reserve boundaries
and create problems in adjacent landholdings. The reverse can also be true. Outside, but adjacent
to, a reserve there may be different landscape objectives and different impacts of fires on those
objectives. Land just outside the reserve boundary may be owned by another public agency or by
private landholders – the extreme being an urban interface. Neighbouring land uses affect reserve
management.
Fire management involves, among other things, preparation for unplanned (wild) fires. Networks of
tracks and trails, prescribed burning and grazing are common themes of preparedness, but are also
items for heated discussion. These topics are covered in the following chapters.
There are no easy answers to the problems of fire management for biodiversity conservation in public
reserves. Knowledge of biodiversity is usually incomplete; knowledge of the interactions between
the elements of particular biodiversity arrays is inadequate; techniques for the fire management of
biodiversity are continually being updated; and unplanned fire occurrence is probabilistic. However,
alternatives are presented for consideration and reasons supporting or not supporting them given
against the background of a rapidly expanding literature.