Legacy Contamination of River Sediments from Four Decades of Coal Mine Effluent Inhibits Ecological Recovery of a Polluted World Heritage Area River

Fire risk can be defined as the probability that a fire will spread. Reliable monitoring of fire risk is essential for effective landscape management. Compilation of fire risk records enable identification of seasonal and inter-annual patterns and provide a baseline to evaluate the trajectories in response to climate change. Typically, fire risk is estimated from meteorological data. In regions with sparse meteorological station coverage environmental proxies provide important additional data stream for estimating past and current fire risk. Here we use a 60-year record of daily flows from two rivers (Franklin and Davey) in the remote Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (TWWHA) to characterize seasonal patterns in fire risk in temperate Eucalyptus and rainforests. We show that river flows are strongly related to landscape soil moisture estimates derived from down-scaled re-analysis of meteorological data available since 1990. To identify river flow thresholds where forests are likely to burn, we relate river flows to known forest fires that have occurred in the previously defined ecohydrological domains that surround the Franklin and Davey catchments. Our analysis shows that the fire season in the TWWHA is centered on February (70% of all years below the median threshold), with shoulders on December-January and March. Since 1954 forest fire can occur in at least one month for all but four summers in the ecohydrological domain that includes the Franklin catchment, and since 1964 fire fires could occur in at least one month in every summer in the ecohydrological domain that includes the Davey catchment. Our analysis shows that mangers can use river flows as a simple index that provide a landscape-scale forest fire risk in the TWWHA.

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Changes in Lightning Fire Incidence in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, 1980–2016

Fire ◽

10.3390/fire1030038 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 1 (3) ◽

pp. 38 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Jenny Styger ◽

Jon Marsden-Smedley ◽

Jamie Kirkpatrick

Keyword(s):

Cultural Values ◽

Fire Regimes ◽

World Heritage ◽

Fuel Load ◽

Lightning Strike ◽

Lightning Strikes ◽

World Heritage Area ◽

Soil Dryness ◽

Heritage Area ◽

Fire Incidence

The Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (TWWHA) has globally significant natural and cultural values, some of which are dependent on the absence of fire or the presence of particular fire regimes. Planned burning is currently used to reduce the risk of loss of world heritage values from unplanned fires, but large and damaging fires still occur, with lightning as the primary ignition source. Lightning-caused fire was rare in the TWWHA before 2000. There has since been an increase in both the number of fires following lightning storms and the area burnt by these fires. In the absence of a direct measurement of lightning strike incidence, we tested whether changes in rainfall, soil dryness and fuel load were responsible for these changes in fire incidence and extent. There were no relationships between these variables and the incidence of fires associated with lightning, but the variability in the Soil Dryness Index and the mean of 25% of driest values did predict both the number and area of fires. Thus, it appears that an increase in the proportion of lightning strikes that occur in dry conditions has increased ignition efficiency. These changes have important implications for the management of the TWWHA’s values, as higher projected fuel loads and drier climates could result in a further increase in the number of fires associated with lightning.

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Caridina malanda, a new species of freshwater shrimp (Crustacea: Decapoda: Atyidae) from the Wet Tropics World Heritage area, north–eastern Queensland, Australia

Zootaxa ◽

10.11646/zootaxa.4652.1.5 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 4652 (1) ◽

pp. 113-125

Author(s):

SATISH CHOY ◽

TIMOTHY J. PAGE ◽

VALENTIN DE MAZANCOURT ◽

BENJAMIN MOS

Keyword(s):

New Species ◽

World Heritage ◽

Molecular Data ◽

Sympatric Species ◽

Morphological Studies ◽

North Eastern ◽

Wet Tropics ◽

World Heritage Area ◽

Heritage Area ◽

A New Species

Integrated molecular and morphological studies of newly collected and curated specimens of the genus Caridina from the Atherton Tablelands, Wet Tropics World Heritage Area in north–eastern Queensland, Australia indicated the presence of an undescribed species belonging to the Caridina zebra Short 1993 complex. This species is somewhat intermediate, although distinct on the basis of molecular data and morphology, from two known sympatric species, Caridina zebra and C. confusa Choy & Marshall 1997, and an allopatric species, C. spinula Choy & Marshall 1997, from the Cape York Peninsula, about 500 km north. It is described here as a new species, C. malanda sp. nov., and compared with similar congeners. A key for the identification of the species, as well as notes on its distribution, ecology, and conservation, are provided.

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