New paper published in Austral Ecology: Rapid on-ground assessment after the 2019–2020 megafires reveals new information on rare and threatened plants in northern New South Wales, Australia
Back in 2020 we won a grant from the Commonwealth Government Bushfire Recovery fund to research some very special plant species. This paper was a long time in the works, and I’m very happy to see it finally shared with the world.
The project suffered a few delays from COVID restrictions and extreme weather events, but we managed to collect some excellent data on a bunch of unique species – thanks to our awesome project team, particularly John and James for most of the legwork! We had hoped to write up the results much sooner, but maternity leave and parenting life got priority treatment.
Our project goal was to determine survival of 21 rare and threatened plant species that were impacted by the catastrophic Black Summer fires that tore through Torrington State Conservation Area in 2019. It was the most severe wildfire recorded in the reserve, and the only wildfire in Torrington’s recorded history that affected the entire reserve area.
Most of the species we focused on were assumed to have been affected negatively by the megafires, based on the very limited available knowledge. Published research for most species is largely limited to the original naming and description, and knowledge of ecological interactions, population sizes and distributions has mostly been assumed based on similar species or historical estimates.
We were surprised to find surviving and recruited populations of all species, except one: Thesium australe, an obligate root parasite that is notoriously hard to detect (therefore unsurprising that we didn’t find it). Some populations supported thousands of newly recruited seedlings, while others were only a few surviving adult individuals. Time will tell how species respond to this unique fire event, and how they respond to predicted increasing frequency and severity of wildfire from climate change.
Visual estimates of fire severity at each site showed that on-ground impacts were extremely patchy at small scales, reflecting high variability in the landscape. The landscape is a unique mosaic of granite rock outcrops, boulder fields, sandy patches, woodlands, and wetlands. Specific habitats can change across the scale of a few metres, and some types of habitats are more resistant to fire than others. Our target species are all rare and threatened because each one is mostly restricted to a very specific habitat type within the reserve, so some were more affected by intense fires than others.
We also documented new information on plant-insect interactions that will inform future research. In particular, we documented likely pollination for two species (Monotaxis macrophylla and Persoonia terminalis ssp. terminalis) and flower visitation for two other species (Kardomia odontocalyx and Boronia granitica) – there is currently no published research on pollination ecology of these species, so our observations provide valuable baseline data to inspire further experimental work.
Our open access paper shares all these patterns and more, discusses their significance, and publishes the first available ecological data on many of these unique species. We hope these data will be valuable to future researchers!
© Manu Saunders 2024
Ecology is not a dirty word 