Fire management

The risk of fire in our bushland areas poses an ever increasing problem to the protection of life and property in urban areas. Most fires today are deliberately or accidentally lit by people but are often only small compared to the wildfires caused by lightning. Accordingly our bushland areas need to be managed so that we can identify risks and plan our activities.

Does fire still have a place in urban bushland? There is overwhelming evidence that fire has shaped the structure of the vegetation systems and plants we have today through thousands of years of fire regimes. Plants such as the Eucalypts have evolved to be able to adapt to fire regimes through various survival techniques to ensure a better recovery than less fire tolerant species. Heath lands and grasslands have a strong response to fire through fast regeneration and an increase in species diversity. Fire also aids a community to maintain its diversity and studies have shown that where fire is excluded it has created long term effects and decline.

Today’s Australian environment is also different to the one of only a couple of hundred years ago. The expansive areas of understorey layers with diverse grasses and herbs from the Aboriginal fire regime, have been replaced by thick scrub. The introduction of weed species has also had an impact in increasing fuel loads and fire may aid in the further spread of them.

The management of fire risk in urban areas isn’t all lost. There are ways in which we are able to make our local environment safer and reduce the impacts to it. This can include the hand removal of fuels from the ground, hazard reduction burning, bush regeneration, selection of fire retardant species and the placement of fire trails. The future of our bushland areas requires careful management and planning in urban areas.