Fire Ecology and Biodiversity

Please join us in Casterton for our information day!

10/7/2018

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Fire & Fragmentation Project Information Day

Casterton Town Hall, 67 Henty Street
Tuesday 7 August, 10:30-15:30
Morning tea and lunch provided

Our Information Day will be an opportunity to:

hear about our current work and plans, and
discuss priorities for fire research, conservation and management in the region and further afield.

Find a provisional program below, and please RSVP by Monday 30 July.

We look forward to seeing you!

Click here to rsvp

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One bag of litter is never enough

28/6/2018

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Most of us headed out to Casterton to spend a week taking photos of vegetation (x5400) and collecting bags of litter (x1080). No camera is sufficiently wide-angled to capture this many litter bags. We built a litter mountain in the lounge room. We had four vehicles and had to pile the litter on the roofs to get it all home.*

The purpose of this vegetation-measuring extravaganza was to better understand why reptiles prefer some sites over others, as part of the Fire & Fragmentation Project. Unfortunately, litter depth doesn't vary much in western Vic and eastern SA, so the tried and true method of sticking a ruler into the litter wasn't going to cut it.

Annalie gamely undertook the process of drying and weighing the haul. Helpfully she's illustrated the process for us, should we ever feel a desire to embark on a litter marathon of our own.

*Slight embellishment, but there really was a lot!

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New paper on edge effects in fire-prone landscapes

25/5/2018

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Different types of fire edges

In a new paper arising from Kate's PhD, we review the literature on fire, fauna, and edge effects to summarise current knowledge and identify knowledge gaps. We then develop a conceptual model to predict faunal responses to fire edges and present an agenda for future research.

Faunal abundance at fire edges changes over time, but patterns depend on species' traits and resource availability. Responses are also influenced by edge architecture (e.g., size and shape), site and landscape context, and spatial scale. However, data are limited and the influence of fire edges on both local abundance and regional distributions of fauna is largely unknown.

Our conceptual model combines several drivers of faunal fire responses (biophysical properties, regime attributes, species' traits) and will therefore lead to improved predictions. To aid the incorporation of new data into our predictive framework, our model has been designed as a Bayesian Network, a statistical tool capable of analysing complex environmental relationships, dealing with data gaps, and generating testable hypotheses.

Please download the paper to find out more.

Parkins, K., York, A. & Di Stefano, J. (2018). Edge effects in fire-prone landscapes: Ecological importance and implications for fauna. Ecology and Evolution. 00:1-12.

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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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Congratulations to Manuela Fischer on her PhD completion!

8/4/2018

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Manuela gave her completion seminar on Friday and is moments away from submitting her thesis. Her exciting project involved use of GPS data and experimental exclosures to investigate resource selection, road crossing behaviour and browsing impact of the abundant native swamp wallaby. Her study took place on Phillip Island, a landscape of natural and human-modified patches, dissected by roads.

She found that wallabies modulate their selection of resources on a circadian basis to optimise the use of resources under anthropogenic disturbance. Although natural vegetation patches are likely to be used, patches of high anthropogenic disturbances are tolerated at night, when disturbances are less. She also showed that roads are avoided, especially during the day and that crossings are more likely when tree cover is high and water further away from the crossing location. Further, she demonstrated that in vegetation patches, wallabies suppress weed diversity, but do not influence native species diversity.

Her work has shed substantial light on the behaviour of Phillip Island's booming wallaby population. Well done Manuela on your inspiring work!

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News from the front

8/3/2018

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(The fieldwork front)

A team of reptile trappers and vegetation measurers has made Casterton its second home over the past couple of months.

This work forms part of Annalie and Sarah's PhD projects, and Kelvin's Masters project. Their missions are fairly ambitious and they've been assisted by Zahlia, Holly, Julian and Matt, as well as a crew of fantastic volunteers.

Please enjoy a selection of their favourite photos, and don't hesitate to get in touch via facebook if you're interested in helping.

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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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Join us for Bushfire & Biodiversity 2018!

22/1/2018

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Our graduate subject runs as a two-week intensive from Monday 9 - Friday 20 April at the Parkville Campus. It combines lectures, computer labs and a field trip to the beautiful Otway Ranges (including an occasional snap tournament, if you're lucky).

The course covers the effects of fire on aspects of biodiversity and ecological processes. Managers are committed to developing science-based ecological burning strategies which achieve both biodiversity and asset protection objectives. Increased knowledge of the ecological impacts of fire on plants and animals facilitates a better understanding of how more effective management can be achieved.

More information on Bushfire & Biodiversity and other fire-related graduate subjects is available here. The Handbook provides additional details.

Please contact us if you have any questions about the course.

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Manuela's wallaby work in the news

12/1/2018

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Manuela is currently wrapping up her PhD thesis and has discussed some of her findings with Westernport Water.

“The key to a peaceful coexistence with our wallaby friends on Phillip Island is education and compassion, especially as they find their natural environment and habitat gradually shrinking, and their interaction with humans increasing."

Click the image below for the full story!

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Four thesis completions and a conference prize!

18/12/2017

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Hearty congratulations to Andrew, Lauren, Sarah and Zahlia on the completion of their research projects.

Zahlia's project examined responses of mammal functional diversity to vegetation structure, fire history and landscape context, and Lauren's explored the responses of individual mammal species to spatial pattern across a gradient of scales. Their theses are the first to arise from the Fire & Fragmentation Project, so their work involved delving into relatively uncharted waters. They spent a fair chunk of time chasing elusive remnant patches of vegetation, and were among the first of us to discover some of western Victoria's less accommodating roads. The long days (weeks) they spent staring at wildlife camera images and consulting experts will be enormously helpful to the camera trappers of the future. We owe them (at least) one!

We also congratulate Andrew Stephens and Sarah on completion of their Masters theses.  Sarah undertook an epic fieldwork campaign involving measurement of three-dimensional vegetation structure and collection of fuel hazard information at Otways sites. Her thesis is accompanied by a new paper in Forests comparing visual assessment of surface fuel loads with destructively sampled surface fuels.

Andrew used a vascular plant dataset collected in the Otways under the Fire, Landscape Pattern & Biodiversity Project to examine the responses of fire persistence traits to productivity and fire gradients.

Andrew, Lauren, Sarah and Zahlia have successfully wrangled their research questions, data and writing within relatively short periods of time, and we hope they have particularly laid back festive seasons! Please find their thesis titles here, and get in touch for more information about their work.

The thesis-submission season overlapped the conference (and fieldwork) season to make for an action-packed spring.

Holly visited Queenstown, NZ for the SEEM (statistics in ecology and environmental monitoring) conference, and Alan, Annalie, Kate, Sandra and Sarah attended the recent joint conference of the Ecological Society of Australia and the New Zealand Ecological Society in the Hunter Valley.

Kate won an award for the presentation she gave on her mountain brushtail possum tracking research.

Well done Kate on this fantastic achievement!

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Welcome to

Fire Ecology and

Biodiversity

Please join us in Casterton for our information day!

Fire & Fragmentation Project Information Day

One bag of litter is never enough

New paper on edge effects in fire-prone landscapes

Another PhD completion! Congratulations to Kate Parkins!

Congratulations to Manuela Fischer on her PhD completion!

News from the front

A holy grail for ecological fire management and research: What aspects of the fire regime make plants and animals tick?

Join us for Bushfire & Biodiversity 2018!

Manuela's wallaby work in the news

Four thesis completions and a conference prize!

Author

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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

Welcome to Fire Ecology andBiodiversity

Fire & Fragmentation Project Information Day

Author

Archives

Categories

Links

Where to find usUniversity of Melbourne4 Water StreetCreswickVictoria 3363Phone +61 (0)3 5321 4300 or email us

Welcome to

Fire Ecology and

Biodiversity

Where to find us

University of Melbourne
4 Water Street
Creswick
Victoria 3363

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