Aboriginal patch burning and the quest for sustainable fire management. This project aims to document historical changes in the spatial grain of the patch burning mosaic in an Arnhem Land savannah with an unbroken history of management by Aboriginal people, and in adjacent areas where traditional management has ceased. The mosaic's spatial grain will be inferred by mapping the individual ages of the long-lived conifer Callitris intratropica. Prior research has shown that Callitris individuals c ....Aboriginal patch burning and the quest for sustainable fire management. This project aims to document historical changes in the spatial grain of the patch burning mosaic in an Arnhem Land savannah with an unbroken history of management by Aboriginal people, and in adjacent areas where traditional management has ceased. The mosaic's spatial grain will be inferred by mapping the individual ages of the long-lived conifer Callitris intratropica. Prior research has shown that Callitris individuals can be reliably aged, and population structures are very sensitive to fire regimes: saplings only establish if unburnt for 10 years. This research is expected to provide the first direct test of the hypothesis that Aboriginal people maintained fine-grained fire mosaics in savannas, and inform bushfire policy debates.Read moreRead less
Has Twentieth Century warming changed southeastern Australia's fire regimes? This project will reconstruct extreme fire seasons and fire events for the past 500 years in three temperate regions of southeastern Australia. This baseline information will extend our historic records of fire, quantify the controls on fire in our landscapes and place recent catastrophic fire events in historical context.
Integrating climate adaptation into rainforest restoration plantings. This project aims to investigate the impact of within species adaptation to climate on restoratoin success in the Australian Wet Tropics. For a suite of six species of tropical tree frequently employed in rainforest restoration plantings in northeast Queensland, this project aims to test the hypothesis that collecting seed from populations in similar ecoclimatic settings to the planting site will result in superior seedling gr ....Integrating climate adaptation into rainforest restoration plantings. This project aims to investigate the impact of within species adaptation to climate on restoratoin success in the Australian Wet Tropics. For a suite of six species of tropical tree frequently employed in rainforest restoration plantings in northeast Queensland, this project aims to test the hypothesis that collecting seed from populations in similar ecoclimatic settings to the planting site will result in superior seedling growth and survival. The expected outcome is to provide practical advice to restoration practitioners about the importance of matching the provenance of seed source to planting sites, and opportunities for selecting provenances pre-adapted to predicted future climatic conditions at planting sites.Read moreRead less
From prediction to adaptation: responding to rapid ecosystem shifts under climate change. Nobody knows exactly how climate change will affect the ecosystems on which we depend for our own existence, though negative impacts are widely predicted. This project integrates mathematical, economic and ecological approaches to learn about the most effective way to spend limited funds for sustaining ecosystems threatened by climate change.