Brief description
Recurrent fire is a dominant disturbance in Mediterranean-climate landscapes. In infrequently-burnt communities, vegetation structure, habitat features and fuel availability can change over time-scales much longer than can be measured using contemporary remote-sensing approaches, creating challenges for conservation and fire management. The Great Western Woodlands (GWW) region of south-western Australia supports the world’s largest remaining area of Mediterranean-climate woodland, which in mosaic with mallee, shrublands and salt lakes cover an area of 160 000 km2. Eucalyptus woodlands in this region are typically fire-sensitive, and fire return intervals recorded over recent decades have been much shorter than the long-term average. This has led to considerable conservation concern regarding the loss of mature woodlands, and has highlighted a need to better understand how plant communities change with time since fire. To characterize longer-term patterns of vegetation structural change, we measured vegetation cover, ground cover, tree density and stand basal area across a multi-century time-since-fire sequence derived from growth ring-size relationships in fire-sensitive Eucalyptus salubris woodlands. The estimated time since fire range of the 76 sample sites ranged from 2 to 370+ years.Data time period: 2010-07-01 to 2012-12-01
text: The western half of the Great Western Woodlands, south-western Western Australia. Sites were established in the vicinities of Karroun Hill (30o14′S, 118o30′E); Yellowdine (31o17′S, 119o39′E) and Parker Range (31o47′S, 119o37′E).
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- Local : lloyd.646