#Macfort fires animals full#

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'Are there tweaks in the methods that we could make to improve the estimates? Depending on what comes in may well be some changes,' Professor Dickman said. The results were released as an interim report prior to peer review, partly to get input from other experts in the field. 'It's very hard to see how we're going to to scale things back.' “I think we've unleashed the demon in climate change,' he said. Professor Dickman said it was, 'quite likely that we're going to get more and more big fires of the kind that we saw over the last fire season'. Professor Dickman said those surveys had been 'systematically downgraded and defunded over the last 20 years to the point where we really don't have any decent long-term monitoring projects underway'.ĭermot O'Gorman, CEO of WWF Australia, said with climate change making extreme fires more common, the findings would 'give other countries a window into the future of mega fires and their devastating impact on wildlife'. They would have been very big catastrophes, perhaps similar in magnitude in terms of numbers,' he said.īoth scientists said that to properly understand the impact of events like these on the environment, better baseline surveys needed to be funded. 'We don't have a good handle on that at all.

Looking more broadly at other types of wildlife catastrophes, Professor Dickman said oil spills like the Exxon Valdez in 1989 or BP's Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010 might compare. Globally, she said she couldn't think of a worse fire for wildlife: 'If we think about known mass mortalities of animals, I'm not aware of anything that compares.' 'I don't know of any greater impact to wildlife in Australia,' Dr van Eeden said. Professor Dickman said he had 'no doubt' some species would have been pushed to extinction.

#Macfort fires animals full#

'So even outside of the impact area, the burn may have caused mortality to animals that we'll never know the full magnitude of what that number is,' Dr van Eeden said. 'It may well be perhaps weeks or even months before populations of particular species disappear because they've been found by predators such as feral cats or foxes, or their food resources dwindle.'Īnd the fire can cause populations outside the actual burnt area to die too, something not considered in the study, said Lily van Eeden, lead author on the study from the University of Sydney. 'It is difficult to get a real handle on it because you're looking at potentially longer-term effects,' he said. Professor Dickman said there weren't many studies that looked at the numbers of animals before and after a fire to determine how many died. 'We'll never know exactly what the number might have been.'įire blackened huge areas of bush, including in the NSW Southern Highlands. 'These are the lower bound estimates,' Professor Dickman said. In addition, whenever there was a choice to make in the study, the scientists say they used conservative estimates of the animals included in the study.

Professor Dickman said the revised figure was still a conservative one, with animals including turtles and fish not included in the estimate, due to a lack of baseline data on their densities. The team has now updated its earlier results to include fires outside NSW - including in East Gippsland, north-east Victoria and Kangaroo Island - and extended the analysis to a greater number of species, including bats and frogs. Professor Dickman's estimate of 1 billion animals lost or displaced made headlines around the world in January.Īt the time, Professor Dickman said that figure - which only included animals lost in the NSW fires and was limited to certain species - was a conservative estimate. 'It's almost inconceivable that so many animals would be lost and displaced,' said University of Sydney professor Chris Dickman, who coordinated the study. It is the worst single event for wildlife in Australia, among the worst in the world and is likely to push some species into extinction, according to the study, funded by WWF Australia.