According to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change late last month, sequestering carbon dioxide is only one of the crucial climate-regulating attributes inherent to the world’s forests.
According to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change late last month, sequestering carbon dioxide is only one of the crucial climate-regulating attributes inherent to the world’s forests.
Achieving biodiversity objectives can be a challenging aspect of fire management because different flora and fauna species may require varied fire regimes in order to maintain viable populations, and trade-offs may be needed to satisfy other objectives. This report describes major findings of a project investigating the relationships between aspects of fire regimes on selected …
Fresh legal action has been launched against Victorian energy provider Ausnet over the Black Saturday bushfires. VicForests is seeking unspecified damages from Ausnet, and also maintenance company Utility Asset Management (UAM), over a timber yard that was razed in the devastating 2009 bushfires. Documents lodged with the Victorian Supreme Court on Wednesday claim Ausnet, and …
Bill Gammage’s popular book ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia’ contains many fundamental flaws and represents ‘blind advocacy’ for repeated burning’ because ‘Aboriginal people did it’. Like Keith Windshuttle’s ‘Fabrication of Aboriginal History’, Bill Gammage only pursued references – and interpretation of references – that supported his ‘hypothesis’. For Gammage that hypothesis …
This is something to watch. In a Productivity Commission draft report cited in early January 2015, the suggestion was that more needs to be spent on bushfire mitigation exercises (to save on disaster relief and recovery). Sounds reasonable? But this suggested $200M mixed with the lobbying influence of the Australian Forest products Association (AFPA), and …
Fuel reduction and ecological burning etc. are based on the assumption that all Aboriginal people undertook fire-stick farming. Joel Wright, traditional owner in southwest Victoria, is an indigenous language, culture and history researcher. He finds no evidence of wide-scale burning in Aboriginal language and culture, but does find other explanations for the history of aboriginal …
Australia’s superb lyrebird clears litter and seedlings from the forest floor, reducing the likelihood and intensity of bushfires, new research suggests. The birds’ activity also preserves their preferred habitat of an open forest floor, says fire ecologist, Dr Steve Leonard of La Trobe University . “They’re reducing fuel by their foraging,” he says. “Our hypothesis …
The Victorian Government stands accused of all but guaranteeing the extinction of threatened Mallee birds as a consequence of its bushfire prevention policy. The Mallee emu-wren, in particular, is just one fire away from being wiped from the planet. The claim is made in a new report from Birdlife Australia, being tabled this weekend at …
There’s 4 times more carbon loss from logging than bushfires. This is from new research presented to the World Parks Congress in Sydney this week from ANU scientist Dr Heather Keith. “In a [logged] forest, the amount of carbon stored in the regrowth …, plus wood products and landfill, is about half that stored in …
In this 6th Age of Extinctions, the biosphere’s life-support systems that have allowed humans to ascend are collapsing. Visionary mycological researcher/inventor Paul Stamets illuminates how fungi, particularly mushrooms, offer uniquely powerful, practical solutions we can implement now to boost the biosphere’s immune system and equip us with benign breakthrough mycotechnologies to accelerate the transition to …
EEG is suing the state government for a fourth time. Legal papers were filed and served on Monday 22nd Sept. Both VicForests and DEPI are being sued. Within the 170,000 hectares of forest that the Goongerah-Deddick summer fires burnt out, were 46 protected zones set aside for threatened owls. These areas would also have supported …
