What was breaking me up, apart from the pictures of utter devastation, was the ones of survivor insectivor birds on charred tree branches looking at the wasteland. Made me think that slow death is still to come for many survivors.
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Still wondering about this - are the junipers native to that habitat and locale? If not, perhaps they were planted in error in the valley to the east, and dried it up?
And are the hawthorn and other deciduous trees native to the area? In fact, where, roughly, is there? Sorry if I once knew and have forgotten…
sometimes junipers or other such vegetation are native but become overabundant due to changes in conditions/ecosystem collapse/disturbance. I’ve also seen cases where people just don’t like the junipers or are wrong about them and remove them for the wrong reasons. ‘native-invasive’ species issues are tricky.
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At the same time as the fires flared in far and north eastern Victoria there has been almost no attention in the media to the fire that burnt out much of Budj Bim (https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1577/) in south western Victoria. I may be wrong, but pretty sure that this a place where cultural burning had been reinstated.
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Interesting.You say the area was burnt in these recent fires?
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Yes. In 40°+ heat on 20 December 110 fires broke out across Victoria. Overnight a further 33 were caused by lightning strikes. One started at Lake Condah and four days later a lightning strike to the east in the national park started a second. By 3 January the two had joined and an emergency warning was issued for surrounding areas: https://www.standard.net.au/story/6565119/efforts-keep-blaze-back-people-told-to-flee/. As of today the fire is “contained”.
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well I suppose the sheer size of this/these fires would have been too much for even the culturally burnt area, but it still sounds like a very good practise if widely and consistently used. What do you think?
I’ve read in a couple places now that a huge amount of wildfires are caused by people, I didn’t realize that before. I don’t know enough about the current fires but I did read about a whole bunch of people arrested for doing it intentionally in Australia.
Will be interesting to see the results as a few areas which have had cultural burning practices have been in the media talking about not being destroyed. If done enough I am sure it could reduce the impact in some areas. Big problem here with so much heat, so dry and massive fires that even areas which had previously had control burns in spring have burnt again. The culturally burnt areas and control burn reduce the ground and low vegetation fuel resource which can result in crown fire, but if a large fire already burning the crown comes along, it will go straight through as well.
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Hope it helps. I would love to see some positive results proven for these - then we could try to get funding and jobs for Traditional Owners running fire projects, plus get a change to management (dreaming). Saw some trials and went to a forum a few years back and it looked really good results.
As for the fires, tomorrow is going to be >40C with a change coming through late - those major wind direction changes are always great for turning a fire flank into a front. Could see a real hell of an expansion of lots of these fires. Here’s hoping it doesn’t.
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Yeah, people can be arseholes. Mostly done by people with mental health problems, sometimes accidentally by morons ignoring warnings. Big problem is authorities are not allowed to detain known pyros prior to high risk days cos it infringes their human rights.
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Good luck for tomorrow. The two Big Days (today for one region, tomorrow for another?) have been covered quite often in NZ media, but I have a poor sense of geography.
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Wouldn’t mind seeing a new thread on that if you have time Mark
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Arson. But they say a bigger cause now is embers. Lightning more than arson.
Yes, dry lightning from the firestorms, right?
Definitely has been some arson, but not the level being promoted by bots on social media. The greatest cause has been regular dry lightning, plus embers and dry lightning from the pyrocumulus ie fires causing more fires.
If you want correct information on fires, our national news is safest,
ABC news - fire misinformation Please do us all a favour and ignore or block any ArsonEmergency tagged posts which are being propagated by bots - or redirect to correct. This garbage is being generated by disinformation bots to continue the confusion/misinformation and prevent proper climate action.
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Why are sensible (in the sense of scientific knowledge) iNat folks across the globe weighing in on what is happening in Australia? And why in the hell do you want to weigh in on causes of these fires without looking at our records. They generally show very little to do with arson. For me, living for almost 65 years in one of the most fire prone states in Australia, I find it insulting that iNat folks in other countries seem to be jumping on board to what sounds like a conspiracy theory. Yes, in relation to climate change this is a wake up call. I think we (Australia) is/are the canary in the coal mine…
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Speaking for myself I’m trying to understand what’s happening. One popular “stereotype” is that it’s all because of arson and environmental activists preventing controlled burns and the conflicting “stereotype” is that it’s just because of higher temperatures and drought caused by climate change. I know reality is more complicated than that but it’s always hard to tell how much. I found a couple sources (including one from an Australian government website) talking about the significance of arson and posted them. Thanks to the responses to my post I now understand that that is not actually as significant for this specific event.
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Why? Because we also live in a mediterranean climate with vegetation adapted to fire. We read about fires … in whichever country is affected at the time. And we read the reports and feedback on those fires.
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