<
https://theconversation.com/we-have-the-proof-that-logging-makes-tasmanias-forests-more-flammable-279103>
"In 1967, catastrophic bushfires in Tasmania killed dozens of people – and very
nearly destroyed Hobart.
A year later, W.D. Jackson, Professor of Botany at the University of Tasmania,
published a short but very influential article on why the fires were so bad. He
suggested that after Tasmania’s wet eucalypt forests were burned by severe
bushfires, there would be a high-risk period during their regrowth when they
are at risk of severely burning again.
This, Jackson theorised, was because regrowing saplings form a very dense
canopy, with little distance between living leaves and the leaf litter and
understorey plants able to ignite canopy fires. If a second fire sweeps
through, he predicted the forests could be replaced with more fire-tolerant
scrub.
Was Jackson correct? Is regrowth truly more flammable? It’s very difficult to
prove regrowth burns more intensely and accelerates bushfire spread, as it’s
not practical to undertake neat, perfectly controlled experiments involving
severe bushfires.
But sometimes, scientists get lucky. We took advantage of a natural experiment
in 2019, when a severe bushfire burned through a research site spanning old
growth wet Tasmanian forests and logged areas of regrowth, giving us access to
data before and after the fires.
In our new research, we show Jackson was right. Regrowth does indeed burn more
intensely than mature forests."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
