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Welcome to 

Fire Ecology and

Biodiversity


School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences | Faculty of Science

University of Melbourne

About us

One size doesn't fit all for conserving our iconic kangaroos

15/3/2021

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This story by Holly Sitters was originally published in Pursuit. It features results from our new paper showing that land managers can help conserve kangaroos by providing a mix of fire histories within large expanses of native vegetation. 

Find out more here: Delaney, L., Di Stefano, J. & Sitters, H. (2021). Mammal responses to spatial pattern in fire history depend on landscape context. Landscape Ecology. 36(3): 897-914.
While kangaroos are easier to spot than many of Australia’s more secretive native species, a suite of threats currently face these magnificent animals.  The 2019-20 fire season was exceptional because, according to modern records, it consumed forests that had never before burnt at such vast scales.

More than 200,000 kangaroos are thought to have died during or soon after the fires in Victoria, where paradoxically, permits have been issued to kill almost 450,000 kangaroos since 2018. At that time, the state’s total population was estimated to be 1.4 million.

Although these figures are alarming, this is not another grim conservation tale.  This year, La Niña climate patterns have brought Victoria’s wildlife and fire crews some respite in the form of summer rain and cooler daytime temperatures. And the Victorian Government’s Department of Environment Land, Water and Planning has among the most sophisticated approaches to ecological fire management in the world, having forged partnerships with researchers and community groups over recent decades.

My team, including co-researchers Lauren Delaney and Dr Julian Di Stefano, works with land managers in Victoria and South Australia to find out where and when to apply planned fire for the benefit of kangaroos and other animals.  Our new research has found that kangaroos prefer a mix of long-unburnt and recently burnt areas within large expanses of woodland or forest.  It’s likely that kangaroos enjoy the shelter provided by shrubs and large trees in long-unburnt vegetation, alongside fresh, green ephemeral foods in recently burnt areas. 

However, the kangaroos’ preferences changed where remnant patches of vegetation were surrounded by pasture, crops or small towns.  In fragmented landscapes, kangaroos did not prefer a mix of fire ages, presumably because they substituted pasture grasses for post-fire ephemerals.  We found consistent patterns in four species: eastern grey kangaroo (Macropus giganteus), western grey kangaroo (Macropus fuliginosus), red-necked wallaby (Notamacropus rufogriseus) and - to our surprise - the yellow-footed antechinus (Antechinus flavipes), a 45-gram shrew-like marsupial.

The yellow-footed antechinus is famed for its unusual sexual exploits, involving the death of all males following an annual winter mating season. After the males die, pregnant females must search for a suitable den in a tree hollow or log where they rear their young.  Fire may cause a shortage of these den sites if it consumes big, old trees which provide lots of hollows. While females are fairly sedentary, a radio-tracking study showed that males live their short lives to the full and may leave the relative safety of native woodland to find food in nearby pasture.

Nonetheless, it was harder to wrap our heads around the notion that the dainty antechinus would venture into paddocks more often than the much larger and more mobile kangaroos and wallabies – but our results indicate that the four species share an ability to take advantage of a range of resources.

We used wildlife cameras to survey the animals on Gunditjmara Country in the heathy woodland of a quiet corner of southwest Victoria, where remnant vegetation is surrounded by pasture, pine and blue gum plantations.  Using a sprawling and dilapidated house in Casterton as a base for our fieldwork, we visited 70 sites and tied cameras near the base of two trees per site. The cameras are triggered automatically by motion and heat, and we placed a smelly bait mix of oats, peanut butter and golden syrup in front of the camera to encourage animals to hang out long enough for us to identify them with confidence.

After 25 days, we returned to pick up the cameras and celebrate our haul of tens of thousands of animal images.
For animals like koalas and echidnas, identification is easy – but Gunditjmara Country features several mammals that are very difficult to distinguish from one another.  Eastern and western grey kangaroos may look identical to the untrained eye, but with practice and help from kangaroo experts we gradually picked up the subtle differences in ear shape and fur colour.

We hope that the outcomes of the many days we spent scratching our heads while looking at grainy images will help land managers decide where and when to use planned fire (or fire suppression) to benefit kangaroos and other less-well-known species.  Although two kangaroos, the wallaby, and the antechinus are not currently listed as threatened or endangered, increasingly frequent wildfires, together with increases in the numbers of kangaroos that can be killed for commercial profit, are likely to be having dramatic impacts on population sizes.

Biodiversity conservation during this time of rapid environmental change can sometimes feel like trying to hold back a tsunami with the palm of your hand.  However, tailoring ecological fire management strategies according to whether native vegetation occurs as a large, continuous block or in fragmented remnants may help preserve one of Australia’s iconic species for generations to come.


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Volunteer opportunity in the spectacular Mount Lofty Ranges

15/10/2019

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We're gearing up for a bumper field season and Simeon is seeking volunteers to help with his research into mammals, fire and fragmentation in the Mount Lofty Ranges near Adelaide.  Field trips will involve habitat surveys, and/or setting up cameras and hair tube traps.

Please contact Simeon if you're keen to help out or would like further information, and keep your eyes on the facebook page for updates on volunteer opportunities.
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Tune in for Amy's and Saumya's PhD confirmation seminars on Friday 10 May

9/5/2019

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Please come along to Amy's and Saumya's PhD confirmation seminars to hear about their plans to better understand how landscape structure, fire and resource availability influence ground-dwelling mammal population persistence.

Join person or via Zoom.

Where:  Small Lecture Theatre, Room 123, Uni Building, Creswick
When:  10.30-11.30 am, Friday 10 May

Both their projects involve measurement of vegetation structure in the beautiful heathy woodland of western Victoria and eastern South Australia.  If you'd like to volunteer to help with data collection between July and October, please get in touch!
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Tune in for Simeon Zylinski's PhD confirmation seminar on Friday 1 March

26/2/2019

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Please come along to Simeon's PhD confirmation seminar to hear about his plans to disentangle the effects of fire and landscape structure on mammal communities. 

Join person or via Zoom.

Where:  Small Lecture Theatre, Room 123, Uni Building, Creswick
When:  10 am, Friday 1 March

Simeon's project involves camera trapping and collection of bandicoot DNA samples.  If you'd like to volunteer to help with data collection in the spectacular Mount Lofty Ranges between March and May, please get in touch!
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Mammal functional diversity increases across vegetation gradients

5/11/2018

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Our new paper arose from Hilman Sukma's Masters research, and highlights the importance of structurally complex vegetation for mammal functional diversity. 

Hilman used wildlife cameras to survey mammals in the Otway Ranges, and combined species occurrence data with ecological trait information to derive measures of functional diversity, which provides a link between species diversity and ecosystem function. 

Mammal functional diversity responded positively to two measures of vegetation structural complexity in both wet and dry forest.  Hilman concluded that conserving structurally complex vegetation may help to enhance ecosystem function.

The paper is free to download until 22 December: 


Sukma, H., Di Stefano, J., Swan, M. & Sitters, H. (2019). Mammal functional diversity increases with vegetation structural complexity in two forest types. Forest Ecology and Management. 433: 85-92
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Another PhD completion!  Congratulations to Kate Parkins!

24/4/2018

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Kate presented her PhD completion seminar last week and is a (possum) whisker away from submitting her thesis.  Her research focussed on edges, which are ecologically important environmental features that have been well researched in agricultural and urban landscapes but remain poorly understood in natural systems.

Fire is an agent of edge creation and a globally important driver of biome distribution and community composition, yet little is known about how fire edges affect ecological processes in flammable ecosystems.  While edge effects and faunal-fire responses have been well studied independently, how animals respond to fire edges remains poorly understood. 

Kate's thesis explores this knowledge gap focusing on the influence of fire edges on fauna, and discusses some methodological advances for ecological field studies.  Her study sites were in Victoria's beautiful Central Highlands where she invested enormous energy installing remote cameras, trapping bush rats and agile antechinus, and fitting pesky-but-cute mountain brushtail possums with GPS collars.  ​The possums in particular played very hard to get, but Kate's persistence paid off and she's currently putting the finishing touches on her analyses.

Congratulations Kate on your epic achievement!
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A holy grail for ecological fire management and research: What aspects of the fire regime make plants and animals tick?

25/2/2018

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Is that a ghostly presence on the right-hand-side or a tree stump?
Growth-stage optimisation determines the proportions of vegetation growth stages (categorical representations of time since fire) that maximise species diversity, providing an operational goal for fire managers.  To date, optimisation has only been applied to growth stages in a fire management context but other aspects of fire regimes, such as severity, are also likely to influence species diversity. 

In our new paper, we ask:
1 How do growth stage and fire severity influence plant and vertebrate species’ occurrence?
2 What mix of growth stages and fire severities maximises the diversity of these groups?

​We surveyed birds, mammals and plants in the tall wet forest of Victoria’s Central Highlands, and found that growth stage predicted the occurrence of many species.  Severity of the most recent fire was important over and above growth stage for a small subset of species; however, low-severity fire was a more important driver of species diversity than any other growth stage or severity category.

Growth stage is a good surrogate for developing conservation targets in tall wet forests, but does not capture the full range of species’ fire responses.  More complex versions of growth stage optimisation that accommodate multiple fire-regime variables need to be explored to yield ecologically meaningful conservation goals.

Swan, M., Sitters, H., Cawson, J., Duff, T., Wibisono, Y. & York, A. (2018). Fire planning for multispecies conservation: Integrating growth stage and fire severity. Forest Ecology and Management 415-416: 85-97 
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Is the Fire & Fragmentation Project honeymoon period over?

31/5/2017

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Evidence for

Evidence against

Having carefully balanced the evidence, we conclude that the honeymoon period lives on.

Last week the Fire & Fragmentation Project team ventured out to the heathy woodland between Dartmoor and Edenhope to set up their second round of camera traps.  This work is part of Zahlia and Lauren's studies into the effects of fire and fragmentation on mammals.  They are currently going through the photos from their first round of camera trapping, and will compile their favourites soon.  Please stay tuned.

Thanks to Sarah, Lauren and Zahlia for providing all the evidence.
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Fieldwork fun and other spring pursuits

26/11/2015

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Alarmingly, it’s been two months since our last news item, so we’ve put together a collection of photos to illustrate some of our springtime activities.

Many thanks to Julio and Alan for these photos.
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27th International Congress for Conservation Biology

10/8/2015

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Holly attended the 27th International Congress for Conservation Biology in France this week to pose (and have a go at answering) the question: does patchy planned fire enhance ecosystem function?

She was among 2,000 attendees from 98 countries at the world’s largest ever conservation meeting, which was held in the middle of beautiful, buzzing Montpellier.


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Where to find us

University of Melbourne
4 Water Street
Creswick
Victoria 3363

Phone +61 (0)3 5321 4300 or email us

Photos contributed by Holly Sitters, Bronwyn Hradsky, students of the Fire Ecology and Biodiversity Group, and remote cameras.
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