Fire Management Practices

With cooler and calm weather conditions across South East Queensland, many burn programs in National Parks are now getting underway.

Each year the window of opportunity to safely conduct burns is narrowing. The obvious constraints are weather, fire intensity and resources such as budgets and staffing.

Fire is one of the best park management tools available. It is a critical component of conservation in Australia. The fuel load, occurrence and area burnt all have significant impacts on flora and fauna species compositions. Many Australian plants and trees need fire to survive and reproduce. However, there is very little scientific collection and research before and after each fire in each of the National Parks. How do we know that some types of fires aren’t causing more detriment than good to the environment?

Unfortunately no amount of prescribed burns will stop severe wildfires like those seen in 2019-2020 where 17 million hectares was burnt across Australia and billions of animals died. One can only hope our National Parks across South East Queensland can make it through the next few years relatively unscathed, given the long term predictions for dryer and warmer weather.