Indigenous fire management shaped Australian tropical savannas over millennia, until the arrival of Europeans pushed the landscape back into a dangerous, unmanaged state.
What does fire management do to soils? We compared prescribed burning to cultural burning and looked at how soil properties changed after fire. Cultural burning was better.
The El Niño is a reminder that bushfires are part of Australian life. But whether or not this fire season is a bad one, Australia must find a better way to manage bushfires.
The Kakadu region has gone through immense transformation throughout history. How can archaeological food scraps tell us about how the First Australians adapted?
Large and out-of-control wildfires can seriously damage ecosystems, but Indigenous fire practices can keep ecosystems healthy and resilient, and even increase biodiversity.
More than 40 fire scientists and forest ecologists in the US and Canada teamed up to investigate why wildfires are getting more extreme. Climate change is part of the problem, but there’s more.
Australia can take great strides forward in climate policy and action. A reactionary, incremental approach to adaptation will fall short. Now is the time to think big.
By collaborating with Indigenous ranger groups, we can make strategic fire and land management practices economically sustainable for traditional landowners.
The unprecedented intensity of two summers of bushfires, first in the east and then in the west, offered harsh lessons for Australians. One is that some settlements must retreat from high-risk areas.
Two starkly different research projects at East Gippsland’s Cloggs Cave, 50 years apart, show the importance of Indigenous perspectives in archaeology.
Pristine and beautiful or black and dirty? As bushfires become more frequent and we look to Indigenous fire control practices, it is time to reconsider our attitudes to burnt earth.