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Fire-driven land cover change in Australia and W.D. Jackson’s theory of the fire ecology of southwest Tasmania

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Tropical Fire Ecology

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Abstract

There are few conceptual frameworks of the effects of fire regimes on landscape-scale vegetation dynamics. A foundational contribution is W.D. Jackson’s “Ecological Drift” model, which, although it was originally developed to explain vegetation patterns in southwest Tasmania, anticipated many leading edge research questions in fire ecology. Jackson proposed that the interactions between plant life histories, soil fertility, and fire frequency cause mosaics of vegetation with fire frequency distributions that have characteristic central tendencies. Importantly, he argued that landscape vegetation patterns could change due to chance variation in these fire frequencies via a process analogous to genetic drift. We reflect on the applicability of this model as an organizing principal for research into fire-driven vegetation dynamics by considering the fire ecology of four distinct Australian ecosystems: (1) the forest-sedgeland mosaic of southwest Tasmania, where the theory was developed, (2) the tall Eucalyptus regnans forests of southeastern Australia, (3) the savanna landscapes, including isolated monsoon forest patches, in the tropics of northern Australia, and (4) the grassland Acacia shrubland mosaic in central Australia. We show that basic impediment in understanding these vegetation dynamics in terms of Jackson’s model is an adequate quantification of fire frequencies, particularly in systems with infrequent fire return times and long-lived trees with limited dendrochronological potential. Even in the northern Australian systems that are burnt every few years, and thus where direct measurement of fire frequencies is possible by analysis of the available satellite record, fire frequency characterization is inevitably complicated by (a) recent changes by the transition from Aboriginal to European-influenced fire management, (b) the inherent complexity of landscape geographic settings, and (c) the increasing effects of climate change. Nonetheless, the dynamics of many of our case study systems substantiated Jackson’s concept of fire-vegetation-soil feedbacks. Such fire feedbacks may cause “self-organization” of landscape vegetation patterns, which would render mosaies vulnerable to abrupt switches in land cover in response to changed fire regimes.

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  1. School of Plant Science, University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, 7001, Australia

    David M. J. S. Bowman & Sam W. Wood

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Bowman, D.M.J.S., Wood, S.W. (2009). Fire-driven land cover change in Australia and W.D. Jackson’s theory of the fire ecology of southwest Tasmania. In: Tropical Fire Ecology. Springer Praxis Books. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77381-8_4

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