Rifai, Sami W., De Kauwe, Martin G., Gallagher, Rachael V., Cernusak, Lucas A., Meir, Patrick, and Pitman, Andy J. (2024) Burn Severity and Post‐Fire Weather Are Key to Predicting Time‐To‐Recover From Australian Forest Fires. Earth's Future, 12. e2023EF003780.

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Abstract

Climate change has accelerated the frequency of catastrophic wildfires; however, the drivers that control the time‐to‐recover of forests are poorly understood. We integrated remotely sensed data, climate records, and landscape features to identify the causes of variability in the time‐to‐recover of canopy leaf area in southeast Australian eucalypt forests. Approximately 97% of all observed burns between 2001 and 2014 recovered to a pre‐fire leaf area index (±0.25 sd) within six years. Time‐to‐recover was highly variable within individual wildfires (ranging between ≤1 and ≥5 years), across burn seasons (90% longer January to September), and year of fire (median time‐to‐recover varying four‐fold across fire years). We used the logistic growth function to estimate the leaf area recovery rate, burn severity, and the long‐term carrying capacity of leaf area. Time‐to‐recover was most correlated with the leaf area recovery rate. The leaf area recovery rate was largest in areas that experienced high burn severity, and smallest in areas of intermediate to low burn severity. The leaf area recovery rate was also strongly accelerated by anomalously high post‐fire precipitation, and delayed by post‐fire drought. Finally we developed a predictive machine‐learning model of time‐to‐recover (R2: 0.68). Despite the exceptionally high burn severity of the 2019–2020 Australian megafires, we forecast the time‐to‐recover to be only 15% longer than the average of previous fire years.

Item ID:	85948
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2328-4277
Copyright Information:	© 2024 The Authors. Earth's Future published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Geophysical Union. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Funders:	Australian Research Council (ARC)
Projects and Grants:	ARC DP190101823, ARC CE170100023
Date Deposited:	24 Jun 2025 01:50
FoR Codes:	41 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES > 4102 Ecological applications > 410205 Fire ecology @ 100%
SEO Codes:	19 ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY, CLIMATE CHANGE AND NATURAL HAZARDS > 1904 Natural hazards > 190401 Climatological hazards (e.g. extreme temperatures, drought and wildfires) @ 50% 18 ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT > 1806 Terrestrial systems and management > 180601 Assessment and management of terrestrial ecosystems @ 50%
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