Introduction

Since its widespread distribution began 400–350 million years ago, fire has played a significant role in the dynamics of the global atmosphere and the evolution of biomes (Roach 2020; Haque et al. 2021). In fire-prone ecosystems, fire in the landscape (commonly termed wildfire, wildland fire or bushfire) has been considered as a ‘disaster’ when it engulfs the environmental components at a larger scale beyond control. Wildfires are a worldwide phenomenon that plays an important role in the terrestrial and atmospheric environments (Bowman et al. 2009). It has been around since the beginning of time, and rhyniophyte plant fossils that were preserved as charcoal caused the first known wildfire around 420 million years ago, during the Silurian epoch (Glasspool et al. 2004). Yearly, around 30–46 million km2 (approximately 4% of the total land surface) is burned (Randerson et al. 2012). Longer fire seasons are caused by changes in the environmental situation, which influence the frequency and intensity of wildfires (Westerling et al. 2006; Flannigan et al. 2013; Settele et al. 2015) and the wider area covered (Gillett et al. 2004). It all starts with a little site, which might have been caused by a lightning strike or human neglect. It spreads over a vast area of forested areas and locality and has adverse impacts on the environment, ecology, properties and human health. The abiotic and biotic constituents of the forest ecosystem are destroyed by wildfire (Godfree et al. 2021). At present, climate change and other associated factors are influencing more frequent and intense fires worldwide on a larger scale (Ward et al. 2020). Catastrophic fires have erupted in Australia, the USA, Brazil, and Russia in recent years, damaging on a larger scale (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Global wildfires and damaged areas (Filkov et al. 2020a, b; Ward et al. 2020). Note: BFF, Bolivia Forest Fires; RBF, Richardson Backcountry Fire, Canada; FNT, Fires in Northwest Territories, Canada; WR, Wildfires of Russia; BCW, British Columbia Wildfires, Canada; CW, California Wildfires, USA; SW, Sweden Wildfires; BCW, British Columbia Wildfires, Canada; AW, Amazon Wildfires; AlW, Alberta Wildfires, Canada; SW, Siberian Wildfires, Russia; ABS, Australian Bushfire Season

Full size image

Like the USA, Russia, Brazil, Turkey, Italy and Canada, wildfire is typical in Australia almost yearly (Table 1). In Australia, a number of wildfire occurrences have been recorded, i.e. Gippsland fires and Black Sunday in 1926, Black Friday in 1939, the Australian Bushfire Season from 1974 to 1975, the Waterfall bushfire in 1980, recent Canberra bushfires in 2003 and the Black Saturday wildfire in 2009 are some examples of devastating wildfires that have occurred in recent history (Weber et al. 2019). The 2019–2020 ‘Black Summer’ wildfires were exceptional among others in terms of burned area, fatalities and ecosystem damages (Simmons et al. 2022; Wang and Cai 2020). This mega fire was 50 times more damaging than the historical worst wildfires in California and 5 times more extensive than the Amazon wildfires in 2019 (Ward et al. 2020). More than 15,000 fires occurred across all states of Australia, resulting in a catastrophe for aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems (Filkov et al. 2020a, b). This mega-fire destroyed a large number of flora, fauna and human habitats (Roach 2020). It killed 429 people due to smoke (Johnston et al. 2021), burned over 18 million hectares and damaged 3113 dwellings (Filkov et al. 2020a, b) and destroyed 3 billion animals (Van Eeden et al. 2020). Table 2 shows the overall impacts of Australia’s ‘Black Summer’ bushfire on air, water, soil, biodiversity, food and human health. The ‘Black Summer’ culminated in December–January, with significant wildfires consuming around double the total land area of preceding fire seasons throughout numerous states (Morgan et al. 2010), with 2019 being Australia’s warmest and driest year on history (Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) 2019). As a result, the cost of Black Summer crossed $110 billion, topping the $4.4 billion cost of the 2009 Black Saturday wildfires, leading to Australia’s maximum number of wildfire fatalities (Ell 2020). Large parts of eastern Australia were engulfed in smoke as a result of the Black Summer fires. A quarter of participants in a January 2020 survey in the worst-affected state of New South Wales (NSW) said wildfire smoke had harmed their health (The Australian Institute 2020). Emissions of fine particulate matter have been connected to negative health effects due to wildfire (Cascio 2018), with fatality rates rising on fire days with bad air quality (Morgan et al. 2010; Johnston et al. 2011). Table 3 shows the damages and fatalities caused by ‘Black Summer’ across Australia.

Table 1 Wildfire occurrences in different Australian states
Full size table
Table 2 Bushfire impacts after 2019–20 season in Australia
Full size table
Table 3 Fire and related losses of ‘Black Summer’ fires erupted in different states of Australia (Filkov et al. 2020a, b; Noble 2020; Wuth 2020)
Full size table

Australia is a habitat to 620,000 species, contributing to 7–10% of all species on the planet (Box 2020). Most of Australia’s species and ecosystems are found nowhere else on the planet. The Black Summer fires were termed by the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements (RCNNDA) as an ‘ecological calamity’, with ‘the most catastrophic habitat destruction for vulnerable species and damage of ecosystems in the postcolonial period’ (Wintle et al. 2020). More than 330 biological communities that were severely endangered and 37 biological communities that were threatened were destroyed by the fires; these communities are all protected under national environmental legislation. (RCNNDA 2020; Box 2020). The 2019/2020 bushfires also caused significant damage to vital ecosystems, such as clean water supplies. After a fire, the loss of plants and grasses, in addition to changes in the physicochemical properties of the soil, may greatly increase both the amount of surface runoff and the soil’s erodibility (Robichaud 2000; Shakesby and Doerr 2006; Shakesby 2011). Following rainfall, soil that has been eroded and ash pose a significant risk of contamination to aquatic systems and aquifers (Smith et al. 2011). Algal blooms can be aided by ash and degraded soil nutrients that release toxins that may induce carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic substances (Hohner et al. 2019).

Background of the horror ‘Black Summer’ development

According to the 2019 annual climate statement, the 2019/2020 Australian wildfire season was the hottest in recorded history, with a maximum temperature of + 2.09 °C and an average temperature of + 1.52 °C. It surpassed the previous average and maximum temperature records of + 1.33 °C and + 1.59 °C, respectively, in 2013. The mean minimum temperature change in Australia’s 2019/20 bushfire season was 0.95 °C, the sixth-warmest recorded value. Figure 2 shows variations in maximum and minimum temperatures at two key locations in NSW and VIC.

Fig. 2
figure 2

Temperature (°C) upsurge in Australian states in 2019–2020 bushfire season (ACS 2020)

Full size image

In addition, between 1999 and 2020, the average temperature in Australia exhibited a large range of variance. The temperature variation ranged from − 1.52 to 1.52°C above normal during the whole time (Fig. 3). The year 2000 had an average temperature of − 0.04°C, while the year 2019 saw an average temperature of + 1.52°C. The lowest average temperature ever recorded occurred in the year 2000 when it fell to − 0.04°C. Before the year 2005, the temperature was never higher than + 1°C. However, in 2005, it became the first year when it exceeded + 1°C, and after 2012 the mean temperature was higher than 1°C till 2020, except in 2015 and 2016 (ACS 2020). These high temperatures in Australia may have a favourable impact on the occurrence of bushfires.

Fig. 3
figure 3

Mean maximum and minimum temperatures (°C) during 2001–2022 at Combienbar VIC and Nowra NSW. Data obtained from Australian Bureau of Meteorology

Full size image

Along with temperature escalation, rainfall pattern was also an influencing factor of recent mega-fires. The rainfall data of Australia was collected from the Special Statement published by the Bureau of Meteorology for the 1999–2020 time span. Rainfall data has been represented in this study every 2 years. Rainfall was 578.8 mm at the start of the time period, and it continued to climb steadily until it reached its all-time high of 710.6 mm in the year 2000. The rainfall pattern showed a sharp decrease after 2000 and a fluctuating trend until 2009. Then, again, there was a rising trend reaching 683.7 mm in 2010 and 696.7 mm in 2011 (ACS 2020). The lowest rainfall in Australian history was observed in 2019 (Fig. 4). Such a dry season with minimum rainfall ignited 2019/2020 bushfires in Australia as a disaster (Filkov et al. 2020a, b). The 2019–2020 bushfire seasons began with a lack of rainfall in large swaths of eastern Australia. The unexpectedly low rainfall in 2019 resulted in significant moisture shortages year-round (Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) 2019). The low moisture content is experienced in the Murray–Darling Basin (Filkov et al. 2020a, b). The average annual soil moisture record in five of the Basin’s 26 river catchments was the lowest for the year 2019, and after 2018 and 2002, it was the third-lowest on-record value for the Basin as a whole. The year 2019 was also the driest year on record for the Basin (ACS 2020). The below-average precipitation that fell throughout the reserving season also had an effect on coastal New South Wales, eastern South Australia, eastern Victoria, northwestern Victoria, the east coast and north coast of Tasmania and the south west region of Western Australia. Rainfalls in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia were the lowest in their history in the 2019/2020 season, while Western Australia and Northern Territory faced 2nd most poor rainfall records in history (ACS 2020; Filkov et al. 2020a, b), eventually bringing a suitable environment for this horror bushfire, ‘Black Summer’.

Fig. 4
figure 4

Total rainfall (mm) during 2001–2022 at Combienbar VIC and Nowra NSW. Data obtained from Australian Bureau of Meteorology

Full size image

Wildfire causes damage to almost every environmental component in a way that is irreplaceable to some extent. Considering the aforementioned wildfire incidence and incurred damages, we aimed to perform a bibliometric analysis for Australia. Bibliometric analysis is the most typical non-traditional review tool. It is a collection of mathematical and statistical techniques for displaying current and ongoing knowledge on a study topic. This tool allows for the collection of reliable quality indicators. It can detect research trends based on country/region publishing outputs, author profiles and research institutes to create an overall research perspective on a subject of interest. The distribution of words in the article’s headline and the keywords can also be used to compare research patterns across time. The current study’s conceptual design is depicted in Fig. 5.

Fig. 5
figure 5

Conceptual design of the current bibliographic study

Full size image

Methodology

We gathered all of the available data about the number of fires, areas under fire disaster, lives lost and homes lost from a large compilation of news stories, survey reports, media releases from responsible authorities of the Australian Government and a few published papers taken from two reliable scientific databases: Scopus and Web of Science. Our goal was to understand the severity of Australian bushfires over the past two decades. In addition, this research aimed to understand the impacts of several fires on burned areas and homes loss to lives lost in the most affected New South Wales and Victoria states during ‘Black Summer’ and to assess the strength and direction of the relationship between the number of the fire, fired up area, homes and lives losses.

Data sources for bibliometric analysis

Several databases offer indexed journal articles, including Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science (WoS) and others. Google Scholar has been criticised for admitting works from predatory journals that do not validate their originality or follow basic editorial norms (Ibba et al. 2017; Chapman and Ellinger 2019). Moreover, due to its lack of quality assurance and irregular citation counts, Google Scholar is unsuitable as a bibliometric tool (Aguillo 2012). WoS was the first collection to offer and permit bibliometrics study, covering 1900 to the present (Mingers and Leydesdorff 2015). Compared to Google Scholar and Scopus, WoS asserts that their collection is the most comprehensive and includes papers with high impact factors (Aghaei Chadegani et al. 2013). The WoS database is distinctive, contains all sorts of articles and recognises their contributors and bibliographic citations (Mongeon and Paul-Hus 2016).

Conversely, Scopus is the world’s most comprehensive reference and abstract repository for the peer-reviewed study of science, engineering, pharmacy and sociology. Elsevier, Springer, Emerald, Interscience and Taylor & Francis are among the publishers having over 20,000 peer-reviewed journals (Fahimnia et al. 2015). Scopus is a well-known scholarly repository for literature and research findings, with both WoS and Scopus-indexed academic publications (Falagas et al. 2008; Oakleaf 2009). We decided to explore key terms and keywords in Scopus and WoS repositories in this study, based on the recommendations of Fernández et al. (2010) and Mongeon and Paul-Hus (2016) by combining Scopus and WoS records.

Topic search, data capture and mining methods

WoS and Scopus were utilised between 1 and 15 January 2022, to locate all essential papers regarding bushfires/wildfires published between 1999 and 2021. Before 1999, our preferred databases found no published works on wildfires. Because 2022 was not available at the time of the study, articles listed in both repositories following 31 December 2021, were excluded. The following search string was used to conduct the queries: TOPIC keywords: (‘bushfire’ OR ‘wildfire’ OR ‘forestfire’) AND (‘env* impacts’ OR ‘ecolog* impacts’ OR ‘human health* impacts’) AND (‘australia’). A topic keyword search includes the title of the article, buzzwords and summary. It was important to verify that the search would be conducted using the correct search word; therefore, we utilised quotation marks. Boolean operators were used in order to guarantee that each and every document was gathered. The Boolean operators used were ‘OR’ and ‘AND’, with the former ensuring that any relevant keywords are detected. The terms in the first set of brackets, however, are only pertinent to the terms in the text.

Both databases have been updated to incorporate citations for English-language research publications, literature reviews and conference/paper proceedings. After that, researchers manually eliminated documents that did not fit our criteria and those that did not have the authors’ names, abstracts or complete text. The revised papers were collected from WoS and Scopus as.txt and.bib files, respectively. Both files were combined using Rcodes in Rstudio, and six duplicate records were detected and eliminated. Finally, 78 records were gathered for the bibliometric analysis (see Table 7 for the most prominent research/review articles on Australian wildfire and its impact).

Data analysis

Bibliometric analysis can be performed using various advanced tools and software. The most commonly used software includes Gephi, BibExcel, VOSviewer, Histcite, Pajek, Citespace and Biblioshiny (the bibliometrix package in Rstudio). For Scopus data, Histcite does not provide bibliometric analysis (Fahimnia et al. 2015). BibExcel operates in a complicated environment requiring knowledge and expertise to do a simple analysis (Fahimnia et al. 2015). We also discovered that accurately using the merged data in Citespace was impossible. For these reasons, we used the well-known statistical computing software R (Biblioshiny in this case) to do the bibliometric analysis in this work. R is open-source and free software that includes several packages for bibliometric analysis (Firdaus et al. 2019).

The bibliometrix tool in R, Biblioshiny, is particularly user-friendly for those unfamiliar with coding (Aria and Cuccurullo 2017). The program yielded data on the most productive authors, countries/regions, institutions, conceptual structure, research hotspots, social structure, and intellectual structure in wildfire research. In addition, the authors’ co-citation network was extracted as a Pajek file from Biblioshiny and displayed with VOSviewer for enhanced visualization.

Measure of influence

In 2005, Hirsch devised objective criteria for evaluating a person’s scientific productivity (Hirsch 2005). An individual is associated with publications in this context, including an author, country/region, institution, journal and so on. The h-index measures how many times h of a person’s publications have been cited at least h times over a given period (Braun et al. 2006). For example, an author’s h-index is 20 if he or she has 20 articles with at least 20 citations. This metric was used in addition to the usual cumulative number of citations and published articles in the current study. Eugene Garfield invented the impact factor (IF) in 1972 as a complement to the h-index. This is a special kind of efficiency measure that appears only in scholarly publications. It is a measure used by journals that shows how often their articles are cited on average over 2 years. Since the impact factor is strongly correlated with the calibre of the research published in a certain journal, it is often used as a measure of both the quality of the research and the relevance of the study itself (Mao et al. 2015).

Results and discussion

Summary information

The dataset that was studied in the literature is summarised along with some basic statistics. In order to provide a comprehensive overview of wildfires in Australian literature, it is required to provide such a picture. Table 4 summarises the key findings from 78 publications between 1999 and 2021. The literature entries in the dataset come from 49 distinct sources, including various journals, conference papers, editorials, letters, reviews and brief surveys, to name a few. There are 297 authors in the dataset, 10 of whom single-authored 12 pieces of literature and 287 among whom co-authored articles with others. The document indicates that, on average, there were 3.81 writers and 4.22 co-authors. The dataset contains a total of 262 identified author keywords and 970 Keywords Plus entries. The latter part of this article delves more into the academic development of the research area over the course of the last two decades.

Table 4 Main information about the final and merged dataset
Full size table

RQ1: How long has the landscape of wildfire research in australia evolved?

Despite occasional fluctuations over the study timeframe, the cumulative number of publications climbed steadily, as seen in Fig. 6. There was a steady state from 2002 to 2007 with only one publication each year. There were no publications in 2001 and 2012, and the highest number of articles was published in 2021 (13 articles). It is conspicuous that since 2015, the interest in wildfire-related research has increased. The research field is rapidly expanding by 13.68% every year. So far, three distinct evolutionary phases have been identified: early evolution (8 articles from 1999 to 2005), sluggish evolution (from 2006 to 2013, there were 14 publications) and rapid evolution (56 publications from 2014 to 2021). When comparing articles from the beginning of evolution to those from the slow and rapid evolution periods, the cumulative growth rates are 75% and 600%, respectively. It is unsurprising that after 2015, the number of articles has increased dramatically, as some major wildfires occurred and 2019/2020 ‘Black Summer’ megafires got considerable attention among researchers. The mean total citations per article (MeanTCperArt) pinnacled in 2007 (80), followed by 76 in 2006, and no citations were counted in 2001 and 2012. Since 2018, there has been a considerable reduction in citations, owing to the fact that it takes many years for recently published works to obtain significant citations. This section’s trend shows how communication and investigation in this area of science are inciting the scientific community’s interest. This is a positive step toward wildfire research and fire management.

Fig. 6
figure 6

Evolution of wildfire research from 1999 to 2021

Full size image

RQ2: How are the scientific studies on wildfire distributed among the core and other scientific journals in this research?

The source of the articles was investigated in order to establish which journals had the greatest number of publishing. The top ten highest prolific journals are listed in Table 5. The journals Forest Ecology and Management and Science have the most publications, accounting for 7.70% of all wildfire-related papers from 1999 to 2021. For journals that publish articles on the study’s topic, it is useful to look at the number of publications as well as other indices like impact factor, total citations (TC), and h-index. Despite having low number of publications (NP = 2) in Climatic Change, in terms of TC, it has garnered considerable attention (116) after Forest Ecology and Management (NP = 6, TC = 214) and PLOS ONE (NP = 5, TC = 143). This could be attributed to the fact that Forest Ecology and Management is the journal with the earliest publication year (PY = 2004), while Climatic Change started its publications in 2016 and PLOS ONE in 2011. The correlation among NP, h-index and TC is pretty significant and positive.

Table 5 Performance of top 10 most productive journals
Full size table

Regarding the impact factor (IF), Science (41.84), The Lancet Planetary Health (19.173), Science of the Total Environment (7.963) and Journal of Environmental Management (6.789) established as the publications that include high-quality scientific writings that have been peer-reviewed. The top six journals’ progression throughout time is depicted in Fig. 7. There were little scholarly efforts on the issue in these journals from 2000 to 2004. Forest Ecology and Management was the most widely published journal on this subject from 2004 to 2014, when PLOS ONE temporarily surpassed it. However, Forest Ecology and Management reclaimed its status as the premier publication in this field from 2020 to 2021. In the 2020–2021 period, Forest Ecology and Management, Science, PLOS ONE and Science of the Total Environment were the leading journals regarding productivity.

Fig. 7
figure 7

Distribution of publications on wildfires across the top six journals

Full size image

RQ3: What organizations and people have done the most to advance knowledge in this field?

Furthermore, from 1999 to 2021, on the topic of wildfire research, a total of 124 research institutions contributed. About 8.06% of all organizations have published at least three publications. This shows that only a few Australian organizations are actively driving this field of research. Figure 8 depicts the outputs of the top 10 organizations in this study that display the contributions of the most relevant institutions in wildfire research in Australia. With 18.97% of the publications produced by these ten institutions, the University of Tasmania has been the most prolific, followed by the University of New South Wales (17.24%). The third most productive institutions were found Charles Darwin University (12.07%) and The Australian National University (12.07%) with a similar number of articles. According to the information gathered, 297 authors have written at least one article about wildfires between 1999 and 2021. Of these authors, 7.41% have at least two publications, and others produced single publications. Table 6 lists the top ten authors on the subject of wildfire research. These ten authors have combined produced 54 of the 329 documents retrieved (16.41%). It is seen that D. Lindenmayer from The Australian National University (ANU) is the writer with the largest publication and multiple performance indicators are implemented in the field; it is found to be the most productive. He has the maximum overall citations as well as the highest h-index. As a result, we endeavoured to figure out what about this author made them so successful in their area. The author has four publications, the highest in wildfire research from 2011 to 2019. In addition, he is working as an Ecology and Conservation Biology professor at ANU, having long experience in his sector. These factors may account for the author’s greater interest and dominance in the field.

Fig. 8
figure 8

Top 10 Australian institutions according to number of published articles

Full size image
Table 6 Authors’ productivity
Full size table

Figure 9 shows the annual scientific output of the ten most important researchers. The larger circles imply that there were more publications during that time. The darker the hue of the circles, the more citations of the published articles there are. The first and most recent publications of the most productive writer, D. Lindenmayer, were published in 2011 and 2019, respectively, as shown in Fig. 9. The authors with the most significant contributions in this discipline are N. Burrows and T. Penman. It is worth noting that only N. Burrows was among the first to contribute to the field (from 2000). Figure 10 shows the research collaboration of authors from the same/different institutions by looking at the linkages among the co-authors listed in the publications. There are four clusters found consisting of 49 authors. The largest cluster (green) consists of 17 authors, the red cluster has 17 authors, 12 from blue and the fewest (three) in yellow clusters. Figure 11 shows the density visualization based on the author’s collaboration network with the colour spectrum. It shows that two clusters are highly dense, composed of authors ‘Price’, ‘Bowman’ and ‘Bond’ and another is ‘Pausas’, ‘Gill’ and ‘Williams’. There are also six light yellow-coloured dense clusters as seen in Fig. 11 centred by ‘Clarke’, ‘Burrows’, ‘Penman’, ‘Noble’, ‘Lindenmayer’ and ‘Mccarthy’. Authors who have more collaborations with others are visualised as red marked clusters followed by green and blue. It can also be seen with a more dense colour spectrum in density visualization analysis for more productive authors with higher collaboration. To increase the research outcomes on the topic of wildfire research in Australia, researchers should be encouraged to join international and national collaborations.

Fig. 9
figure 9

Authors’ scientific production over time

Full size image
Fig. 10
figure 10

Authors’ collaboration network analysis

Full size image
Fig. 11
figure 11

Density visualization of authors collaboration network

Full size image

RQ4: Where is the current wildfire research in australia focusing, and what are the emerging trends?

Keywords Plus is used in this part to find research hotspots and trends in wildfire studies. Words or phrases that often occur in the titles of citations inside an article but not in the titles themselves or as Author Keywords are considered Keywords Plus. Garfield (1990) claimed that Keywords Plus terms might represent the contents of the article at a deeper level and with more diversity, whereas Zhang et al. (2016a, b) suggested that Keywords Plus should be used in scientific disciplines’ bibliometric analysis.

Figure 12 highlights the fifty most regularly mentioned phrases in the research field. The most often occurring phrases are ‘Australia’ and ‘wildfire’, followed by ‘environmental impact’ and ‘fires’. The frequency of the top 10 Keywords Plus is found at least 16 times, and the observation suggests that all of them have mainly centred on the fire, smoke, and environmental impacts of wildfire. Unsurprisingly, the term ‘Australia’ got the highest frequency (91), and ‘wildfire’ got the second highest (58) because most research articles focused on fire or bushfires. The authors are assessing ecological or environmental impacts after wildfires in Australia. This trend is presently escalating with the increasing interest of researchers. Figure 13 shows the top six Keyword Plus growth from 2000 to 2021. ‘Australia’, ‘wildfire’, ‘environmental impact’, ‘fires’, ‘climate change’ and ‘smoke’ are mostly abundant and have the highest growth in between the study timespan. ‘Australia’ is the most frequent and has maximum growth followed by ‘wildfire’ and ‘fires’. From 2000 to 2015, the growth was slow, but from 2016, the word growth escalated significantly till 2019, and after that period, research intensity was maximum and got the highest frequency. It shows that research interest in wildfires or fires has increased dramatically in recent times in Australia.

Fig. 12
figure 12

Top 50 keywords on wildfire research from 1999 to 2021

Full size image
Fig. 13
figure 13

Top six Keyword Plus growth from 2000 to 2021

Full size image

Wildfire management in Australia

Wildfires, including droughts, have long been a part of the Australian climate (Bell and Adams 2008; Borchers Arriagada et al. 2020; Dickman 2021), which are now a significant environmental and socioeconomic threat, with government agencies in Australia and New Zealand spending hundreds of millions of dollars per year to combat them (Filkov et al. 2020a, b). The number of people living on the urban–rural interface in bushfire-prone areas is rising significantly each year, thanks to expanding capital and regional cities and better lifestyle. Wildfire-related disasters have made them victims (Eriksen and Gill 2010; Fairbrother et al. 2013). The raw materials for any wildfire are the availability of fuel such as grass, leaves and twigs of plants, oxygen from the ambient air and heat or direct flame (Chuvieco et al. 2002; Aldeias et al. 2016). However, Australia should reduce the likelihood of a fire and limit the spread by reducing the raw materials responsible for wildfires. Land management techniques could be one of Australia’s significant options for fire risk management (Hughes and Mercer 2009; Syphard et al. 2013). Reducing forest or grassland fuel presence (Price et al. 2015), slower and often stopped bushfires spread (Ellis et al. 2004) and offering firefighters better access routes to reach the blazing locations easily might be effective during the fire (Dwyer 2022). After a fire, land management is a crucial factor to minimise the losses and intensity of fires (Garcia et al. 2021). A community-based approach is also needed for land management strategies for firefighting across Australia (Russell-Smith et al. 2017). Rural people or people who live near the bushland in urban areas have both their own, their neighbours and the broader community are the key stakeholders to land management and fire prevention (Hughes and Mercer 2009; Koksal et al. 2019).

To make buildings or houses more resistant to fire hazards, strong building codes and regulations should be established for each Australian state (Hamin and Gurran 2009; Mutch et al. 2011; Navaratnam et al. 2019). Local government authorities in some fire-prone states have rules governing home siting, layout, and the use of construction materials (Hughes and Mercer 2009; Mockrin et al. 2020). The authority should keep an eye on implementing all building design and planning requirements. These measures can be effective in minimizing damage to houses and reducing fire losses and preventing and spreading bushfires (Gill et al. 2013; Calkin et al. 2014). Most bushfires in Australia are caused by people and their acts as intentional or unintentional burning-off that has gotten out of hand as well as fires escaping from burning garbage heaps (Thakur 2023). Mass education is usually intended to give people a greater understanding of the consequences they face from wildfires and the steps the community may take to reduce the risks. Television and radio programs could be useful in informing the general public about their duties in terms of fire prevention (Folkman 1973; McCaffrey 2004). These fire safety and prevention campaigns could be aired throughout the year, especially for fire-prone states across Australia.

Moreover, they can inform citizens about the impending danger to adopt necessary measures. Besides, responsible authorities of different states should focus on the following measures and strongly implement the guidelines. First, the public entrance should be restricted to the forest land (Black et al. 2013). Better soil management should be considered to keep the ecosystem alive; for example, increasing soil microbial activities to reduce soil erosion (Lal 2015). Third, an eco-friendly fuel policy should be accepted to reduce the temperature (Haque et al. 2021). Creating wildlife sanctuaries to protect endangered species in their natural habitat should be essential for reducing risk management. Environmentally sound development projects should be planned to minimise fire risk (Distefano 2005). However, there are several challenges for researchers and policymakers to understand the magnitude of fire threats and design practical management approaches (Stephens and Ruth 2005; Cosgrove and Loucks 2015). There are lack of data and trustworthy research articles, insufficient fire impact assessment study and inadequate study on cause-effect relationship of fires; these are some challenges for researchers to forecast before fire seasons (Paoletti et al. 2007). Bushfires also have a number of additional management challenges. The challenge is to provide stakeholders with reliable information on rate of fire spread and location of the fire front so that they can plan secure preparation time in their specific circumstances (Gill and Stephens 2009). Another challenge is predicting the effects of fires on various flora and fauna species composition (Chapin 2003; Gill et al. 2013). These challenges should be addressed by responsible authorities in Australia with the goal of ‘long-term improvements rather than short-term fixes of the system’.

Research gaps

There are a few gaps in the field’s existing literature, according to the titles and abstracts of the 78 publications recovered and the conclusions of the current study (Table 7). The first research gap is the scarcity of studies on management policies and regulatory systems to limit wildfires’ size. Most of the published articles were based on wildfire causes and consequences. Second, most research focuses solely on fires’ ecological and environmental effects but does not significantly discuss human health impacts. According to (Wintle et al. 2020), the mega-fires in Australia during 2019–2020 resulted in the devastating loss of human life, the worst destruction of habitats for endangered species and damage to ecological communities in postcolonial history. They studied to protect impacted species from extinction and showed how to avoid repeating the impacts of such devastating bushfires. A holistic bushfire evaluation and mitigation model have been suggested based on a mixed-method approach of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) (Munawar et al. 2021a, b); however, this is the most recent notable investigation about fire management after the study conducted by Kanowski et al. (2005). These studies may be important for responsible authorities to adopt the proper fire impacts mitigation and management policies. Another research gap is the small amount of study done in this area. Though our study in the ‘Summary and information’ section (RQ1) indicates that the research field is expanding, the annual growth rate is not encouraging. Finally, there is still potential for development in Australia regarding inter-institution/author joint research.

Table 7 List of publications related to Australian bushfire from 1994 to 2023
Full size table

Limitations of the study

It is worth mentioning that the current study is not spared from limitations. This literature review and bibliographic analysis were solely performed by focusing on wildfires in Australia and did not compare with other occurrences elsewhere. Therefore, future research opportunities exist to comprehend the situation in Australia and other nations impacted by wildfires. Furthermore, the search phrases were used at the authors’ discretion to reduce excessive contamination in the database as much as possible. However, if more relevant search phrases were included, different results might have been obtained. Nevertheless, we do not expect a considerable departure from the current study’s conclusions. By integrating numerous databases, timespan, and relevant search phrases, a future study could supplement the present study to find other minor but relevant studies.

Conclusion

Wildfires are a common and frequent occurrence in Australia, and they have played a key role in altering the continent’s landscape for millions of years. Research related to wildfires has been growing in Australia for the last two decades. A bibliographic analysis is effective in this context to know the research status and research gaps. Bibliometric analysis successfully distinguishes and maps the accumulated scientific knowledge and subtleties of evolution in well-known domains by making sense of vast amounts of unstructured data in a systematic way. So, a well-done bibliometric study can help academics get a complete picture of the research area, find gaps in knowledge, come up with new research ideas and figure out how they want to contribute to the field, laying the groundwork for the field to move forwards in new and important ways. This study gives a list of signs that can be put together to take a useful picture for advancing wildfire research. The key data of 78 different kinds of literature published between 1999 and 2021 was obtained using bibliometric approaches from 49 sources based on the Web of Science Core Collection (SCI and SSCI) and Scopus databases. Since 2016, the research industry has grown a lot, at an average rate of 13.68% per year. This study also showed six core journals: Science, Science of the Total Environment, Journal of Environmental Management, Forest Ecology and Management, The Lancet Planetary Health and PLOS ONE on wildfires research in Australia. From 1999 to 2021, 124 research organizations contributed to wildfire studies. Only 8.06% of all institutions have produced at least three publications. From 1999 to 2021, 297 authors have published at least one paper about wildfires. Of these authors, 7.41% have at least two publications, while others have only one. To handle this topic, tremendous efforts are needed to foster more cooperation among academics from the same/different institutions. International collaboration can also aid capacity building and technology transfer for wildfire research which could be especially advantageous for countries most affected by wildfires. The current study’s findings may assist in clarifying the existing state of research and future directions for public officials and academia.