Get serious for a minute. Yes in some circumstances grazing can reduce the risk of fires. Grass that is eaten does not dry out and is reduced in height so all things equal there is a reduction. Likewise cow pats are not continuous dry grass is, or can be. The real issue is would people be happy to have domestic animals in National Parks and the like? Possibly not, not green enough but in other parts of the world for example the UK it is the norm. Likewise huts such as Pretty Plains are being maintained and rebuilt after fire as a recognition that they are part of Australia's heritage while other above the snow line where they are most needed are being removed such as Alpina. Would grazing prevent the worst of fires? No. Would it help in some circumstances? Yes.

OK, as a qualified fireman, I can possibly help out here.

the cows eat the grass, this provides two things. First it keeps the grass low. Second, it reduces how much grass is there is in the first place. Those who have gone camping would know that you require grass and other small easy to burn substances to light the twigs and sticks, and later larger pieces of wood. So, yes, cows being grazed in National Parks would work and used to work very nicely until the Greenies put a stop to it (it was called rough-grazing) claiming their hooves damaged the ground.

More importantly is annual burn-offs. These are burn-offs, performed by qualified personnel, during the cooler autumn and winter months. It reduces the fuel load, so that should a fire come through the area, it is unable to become large and ultimately devastating.

For those of us old enough to remember, they used to use the term 'crown fire', this was a bushfire that had gained enough momentum, through having sufficient fuel, to create enough heat and get itself into the tree tops. This is the worst type of fire, as it moves very quickly, and drops burning embers to the ground to further ignite lower areas an allow it to spread. The ember also are more apt to escape any containment lines and start new spot fires up to a kilometer away.

Sadly, the Greenies are again to blame for the stopping of the annual burn-off period, claiming amongst other things;

It damaged the environment. This is false, as the Australian flora has evolved with bushfire that started through both natural and man-made causes.

It killed all the animals. No, the animal generally ran away, or went underground. Those that did die, were slow, weak and often sick. Essentially a natural way to prune the herd.

It wasn't necessary. Wrong again. The Australian bush has, as I stated, evolved to withstand fire. Why do you think within approximately 2 weeks after a fire, trees and grass return? They weren't destroyed. In fact there are some Australian plants that NEED this to have their seeds released.

So to make it simple. We need a return to the winter burn-offs, and rough-grazing. the sooner, the better.

Why are you just comparing Desiel and cows? why not desiel and goats? kangaroos? etc

A big mistake then obviously was to ban Aboriginal language and to assume that the settlers knew all that needed to be known. 60,0000 years of knowledge lost.
Potatoes originating from South America makes Irish knowledge of their horticultural needs a big question.
But there is a similarity. You think that Australians know all about fire. After 200 years we know all about it? Hopefully we can learn from our mistakes.

Yes Phil and our cattle trampled over the pre-1788 soft soils, compacted them, changed the ability of soil to absorb water, re-directed the rainfall to the river beds, swelling the rivers which cut through the clay pans releasing the salinity..... and so on. I think it's way too late to revert to 1788, but allowing cattle into national parks will not help.

What might help is a fine-grained fire regime in national parks, based upon the ecology of each one.

Mark: You will get more bio-diversity if there is more diversity in the ways country is managed. For example, need time to reach the stage where they can resist fires and/or set seed that will survive fire. This type of species may be wiped out by frequent cool fires while surviving the occasional hot, widespread fire.....
You wonder how many species have died out because of our obsession with pristine wilderness.

r'hino sized Diprotodons in vast numbers roaming the landscape all through the time our ecologies and fauna were evolving (right up until the first australians turned up, but thats another story).'

Indeed. Did you read the last Quarterly Essay by Tim Flannery?

There is some interesting stuff said here, and I have no expertise in the Wet/Dry regions of the northern part of the continent, although I am aware that the small mammal populations are declining not due to the Cane Toad, and it has not been established why. The connection between snail and fig tree is a fantastic example of the intricacy of ecology that we simple don't understand, some of which may not fit into the expected conservation paradigm. Without really knowing, my guess is that as snails can be litter shredders, they are getting more nitrogen and more moisture out of the litter under these trees, since natural vegetation is essential to both. Thus we have a complex ecology in the north that is highly unlikely to be congruent with the complex ecology in the south. Both however have complexity and resilience in common, as well as existing in patchy mosaics, which no doubt at some point in time the Aboriginal community contributed to the establishment of. However patchy mosaics also exist in other ecosystems overseas not subject to fire-stick burning, so it is a natural feature of some ecosystems. As such there is a mosaic of wetter and dryer, younger and older vegetation patches, so that if it all goes up, some animals and plants hang on in some places. But the dry stuff burns.
Therefore the ecological fire management going on in the north worries me as it does in the south. In the north they are burning to reduce the load, often from introduced grasses such as Elephant Grass that have taken over. It should be remembered that herbivores actively encourage grasses by nature, not moist rainforest or the like. I believe by long-term control burning and also probably by grazing regimes we may be shifting the abundances of the vegetation types from moister to drier types. Thus actually we are causing an evolutionary trend set in place by climate change to get worse, in a sort of slow-motion shift. This needs to be investigated.
It should always be remembered that the "management" actions we perform may have long-term evolutionary implications.

Have you thought that what is actually going on there is that the large herbivores are maintaining cover for the small mammals because they are actively favoring grasses over other natural vegetation. Thus in fact the rodent population may have been kept artificially high by an unnatural situation, and then crashed when the habitat changed. The main idea with a national park is to get a natural, not an artificial, ecosystem paradigm. Thus removal of cattle from national parks and from forests will have implications, but over time the natural system restores itself to a steady state. And it does take time, you can't expect the Alpine National Park or others to bounce back in a couple of years. It is a bit painful for all involved, but I really don't want to see the preservation of natural systems in Australia reduced to the preservation of managed artificial systems that work but do not resemble the natural ecosystem hardly at all.
There are even calls for thinning in National Parks. On this issue, one should point out that natural selection is no picnic, it wipes out all the juveniles that can't compete in no time, with fire, flood, disease and all manner of nasties. Only the suited do survive. It is not necessarily pleasant at all. But if you go in an thin, similarly to going in and wiping out millions of kangaroos, you have absolutely no idea whether you are wiping out the best of the gene pool in the process, the ones that would make it if left to nature's devices, and thereby weakening the genetic diversity and strength of the vegetation or the roos in the process. I mean really do we not only want to treat the Aboriginals like children in the "Intervention" but also have our hands on everything that goes on in national parks too, so that they are more like parklands with no hope of surviving climate change, than real resilient ecosystems with the strongest chance to bounce back from anything nature throws at them.
It is like the kids who get asthma and allergies from being kept inside away from the dirt. Heaven help them.

Half of which alpine herbfields etc. are moister vegetation communities than grasslands which generally readily dry out and light up. However the problem is people can't instantly see the natural vegetation coming back- which it doesn't. So there is a transitional period where the grass thrives but nothing else does. Here where I am it is a case of the weeds thrive but nothing else does after declaration of the red gum parks. People say a good flood will fix it. However, why don't we actively try and help these systems that we have destroyed. Then we might find that the moister communities come back just that little bit quicker and there is just that little bit less hysterical whingeing, something to do with the Premier's brother-in-law being involved, I saw in one post which was rather funny. Nevertheless there are vested interests in having the cattle in parks and forests i.e. financial, and they are not the same as those of us who would like to maintain these parks and forests in as moist a condition as possible.

"no Australian plant is naturally fire-adapted"

Sheesh! Quite a few Australian plants not only need fire, they also need smoke exposure.

It would be quite a trick for wombats to digestively germinate seeds when the last megafire has wiped them out.

I see you're an "activist". Figures.

Roger, I stand by what I wrote. I would have thought an academic would be prepared to listen and consider alternative views, not just dismiss them out of hand. Again, after more than 40 years of active involvement in reveg. and wildlife issues, and watching deliberately lit fires destroy much wildlife habitat, I absolutely stand by what I wrote.

A nuanced response Pat, with which I don't have serious disagreement. But it is an oversimplification tinged with some prejudice I suspect.

My point was that many Australian plants have a fire responsiveness that can only have evolved over millions of years. Which simply leads to the conclusion that the continent has experienced fire for a very long time.

If you visit Yellowstone National Park you will see ample evidence of the fires that devastated the park around 1988. The regeneration is minimal. Contrast that with the forest regeneration around Talangi, devastated by the black Saturday fires and it is comparing chalk and cheese. There are biological charactistics of many Australian plants that are not seen elsewhere and an only have been born in an evolutionary history involving fire.

Green activists, most of whom live in the inner suburbs of our cities simply have no comprehension of the environment they seek to protect. Hence we have so many bad policies in place.

Caroline,
Yours is a good commentary. Unfortunately we humans are the elephants in the room, and although I fundamentally believe if we left everything alone nature would take care of it, that is an unrealistic expectation in the world in which we live. Which in my mind requires us to actively manage rather than passively sitting by.

Fire thrives in less complex environments like grasslands. Nature sees pastures as very simple types of grasslands, and they respond randomly to environmental perturbations unlike more complex vegetation types.
At the bottom of the Central Highlands is a lot of grazing properties and a lot of roadsides with just trees and no understorey- except for long dried grass.
Natural forest has very little grass in Australia, except for specialist types like Grassy Woodlands, which may be transitional (one step up) from grasslands, as may Savannahs in the north, both woody and grassy combined. But as it gets more closed and complex, the grass starts to disappear. The evidence as discussed in other posts seems to point to the closed forests e.g. damp and wet schlerophyll, rainforest, not burning a lot until Europeans got here and started logging and roading through them.
Slashing and burning bushland clears "fuel load" alright- and replaces it with grass. Then it has to be continuously maintained. The very people who call for cattle in the high country, which has vegetation which will eventually (nature is slow) come back, which is wetter than what the cattle encourage- which is probably grasses. There is an active component to herbivores- they are not tree dwellers usually, and foster the grasslands in which they live.
Therefore if we want huge areas of grasslands everywhere, slash, burn and mow.
Victoria had huge areas of native grasslands on the low country before we came and wiped them out and put in crops and introduced grasses. That is possibly because the Aborigines burnt the low country for food.

Sorry that was meant to be they burnt for food, not they burnt for fire, too quick typing. If I was going to bag me a few frizzled lizards, and a couple of dead lyrebird chickens, I wouldn't bother up on the high ranges as the goannas don't even go up there, and I'd be risking my neck. However down on the coastal plains, more chance of getting out alive as it is nowhere near so hard going as those mountains to walk over (with no roads)- especially after regular burning which tends to thin it all out. As well as that the distribution of bandicoots and potoroos in my experience is higher in the foothills than above 600m. So inferno for Bush Rat, or just stand back and watch for barbecued bandicoot? Any good runners for the Bush Rat?

"Why is it acceptable to "infer" past practices through studying tree ring data but talking to the people with direct connections to these past management practices is only given lip service?"

Seems the scientific, environmentalist and govt bureaucracies (parks forestry, local Govt) are practising an ecological version of terra nullius. They get indigenous people in for heritage advice but thats about it.

I did work with an aboriginal elder up the coast for a few years.

With regards tree-ring analysis - The Conversation is couched as an academic/scientific forum and tree-ring analysis is published in scientific journals, so I think it is relevant.

Soil mychorriza, burning (or lack thereof) and eucalypt forest dieback seem to be related in moist eucalypt forests on the Oz east coast. But the thought of getting in there and actively managing (as the aborigines did -?) is a real challenge to the beliefs and values that many of us westerner have. It really spoils the 'wilderness theme park' experience.

Before we start worshipping past aboriginal burning practices as a panacea, we need to ask “What is our objective in applying fire?”

I would posit that maintaining maximum biodiversity will not be achieved using historical aboriginal fire regimes. Their reasons for burning were different to what we need to do now to compensate for loss of species abundance and a highly fragmented landscape. In many parts of Australia the application of pre European fire regimes would be quite inappropriate and anachronistic for the condition of contemporary ecosystems and landscapes. Certain fire frequencies, intensities and seasonality will advantage one suite of species over another. We need to decide exactly what we are trying to do by using fire, assess the potential impacts of various fire parameters and adopt a methodology that will lead us to the selected objective(s) over a protracted time frame.

We need to accept that we live in the here and now. The problems we confront in understanding how to use fire for ecosystem and landscape management cannot be solved using blanket, simplistic approaches such as resurrecting past fire regimes.

yes that 'silo' or perhaps 'tribal' thinking is a real problem. What we end up with is stupid short-term political decisions made to win votes at the next election. The polarisation in virtually every online forum in Australia on virtually any topic is probably the reason we have such an adversarial political system.