Fire Management across Australia

Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC) delivers Australia's largest non-government fire management program across more than 7.5 million hectares of northern Australia, including on AWC, pastoral, Indigenous and government land. This program has reduced destructive wildfires across a vast landscape by more than 50%.

In Central Australia, fire follows the dramatic cycles of boom and bust patterns, with wetter years usually followed by years of widespread fire. The part of Central Australia around Newhaven Wildlife Sanctuary – on Ngalia-Warlpiri and Luritja Country – was subject to a traditional Aboriginal fire management regime until the 1930s; a tight mosaic of numerous, mostly small-scale burns lit deliberately for a range of purposes.

At Newhaven, the goal of AWC’s fire management is to re-establish appropriate fire regimes that conserve species and ecosystems, and that restore ecological processes. It’s a formidable job. AWC’s small field-based team is tasked with managing the 262,000-hectare sanctuary in a landscape that is highly flammable, while taking into account the needs of different vegetation types, the vagaries of climate from year to year, and the legacy of complex, multi-year fire histories. To succeed in meeting its objectives, our program of prescribed burning must be led by strategic planning, informed by science, mapping and years of experience on the ground.

A lot of work goes into developing a detailed plan for prescribed burning activities each year. By analysing satellite imagery going back three decades, we’re able to compile fire history maps which show the age of vegetation across different parts of the sanctuary. Using fire history maps we can work out where to burn to break up larger, homogeneous patches into smaller areas of differently aged vegetation.

Careful fire management at Newhaven over the past 12 years has achieved great results – protecting fire-sensitive stands of mulga woodland and desert oaks, establishing a finer-scale mosaic of spinifex, and improving habitat for threatened wildlife. Thoughtfully applied, fire is an essential and positive part of conservation land management in Central Australia.

For more information on AWC’s latest progress and partnerships, please view the 2022 Annual Impact Report and 2021 Ecohealth Reports.

Links:

• Ecohealth Reports
• 2022 Annual Impact Report
• Newhaven Wildlife Sanctuary

Effective fire management is a primary focus of AWC’s operations. AWC’s approach to conservation in the Kimberley, in particular fire management, operates at a landscape scale, crosses many tenure boundaries, and involves numerous partners and stakeholders. However, unlike other areas of Australia, ecosystems in the Kimberley do not currently have ecologically mapped classifications. A lot is known about species diversity and ecological characteristics but there is no agreed and structured approach to mapping such attributes and how this can inform fire management.

Since 2016, the area in which AWC is involved in fire management in the Kimberley has expanded rapidly. AWC now operates the Ecofire program (early dry season (EDS) prescribed burning to promote a mosaic of vegetation of different ages and reduce the extent and intensity of late dry season (LDS) wildfires) across 6.1 million hectares, on AWC sanctuaries and in collaboration with Indigenous partners and neighbouring pastoral stations. Furthermore, AWC and our partners also respond to LDS wildfires in the Kimberley across 4.3 million hectares. AWC’s fire management resources are finite and maximising the efficiency of their deployment is key to optimising conservation and ecological outcomes.

The challenge for AWC has been to develop and build a science-informed tool that:

• covers 4.3 million hectares of AWC’s area of involvement  
• incorporates available ecological information and survey data of threatened, endemic or fire-sensitive species relevant to fire management
• is conceptually simple and uncluttered
• most importantly, can be used as a transparent, communicable and structured decision-making framework, to prioritise the deployment of fire management resources across multiple tenures and ensure protection of high priority ecological assets.

To achieve this a framework was developed to map Ecological Priority Zones (EPZ) across sanctuaries and partnership areas as a tool to support fire management decision making. The objective of this framework was to score high (EPZ 1) to low (EPZ 5) priority zones across the management areas based on ecological values and assets, prioritising areas and species negatively impacted by wildfires. This was achieved by breaking each management area into segments representing ecological features, vegetation and habitats relevant to fire management. Each segment was assessed against the EPZ Framework, consisting of two stages:

Stage 1 – an initial decision tree to assess key values.  

Stage 2 – further evaluation through the EPZ categorisation assessment.

Reflecting AWC’s mission to conserve all Australian animal species and the habitats in which they live, the first stage of the EPZ evaluation was to assess critical ecological values; specifically the presence of endangered species (EPBC, BCA, IUCN), threatened ecological communities, range restricted endemic species or rainforest. Rainforests were included in the initial assessment due to their importance as refuge sites for threatened species and sensitivity to impacts from fire. The presence of these critical ecological values resulted in segments with an EPZ score of one, the highest ranking. The absence of these values directed evaluation of a segment to Stage 2, an EPZ categorisation assessment. Categorisation is based on identifying other ecological values important to consider in relation to fire management – for example fire sensitivity of fauna and/ or flora, vegetation age and complexity of vegetation age mosaics – and weighting values depending on relative importance. Ultimately, each segment gained an EPZ score between one and five.

The EPZ Framework has now become an integral part of fire operations in the Kimberley, with our partners’ endorsement. AWC has used the EPZ Framework in 2020 and 2021 as a key decision-making tool to coordinate and guide both the EDS prescribed burning program and, importantly, LDS wildfire suppression activities. As an example, if there are multiple wildfires burning across the 4.3 million-hectare management area, the EPZ Framework identifies where and how AWC and our partners direct people and helicopters, and the level of investment made to prevent further spread of a destructive wildfire. The development of a transparent, communicable, and structured decision-making framework has enabled a more comprehensive and strategic approach to fire management in the region, ensuring that AWC directs resources and effort to conserve the Kimberley’s high priority ecological assets.

Links:

• AWC Kimberly Fire Program