I graduated from the University of Melbourne with a Master of Environment (with Distinction) degree, specialising in Climate Change, in August 2024. This degree marked a pivotal point in my life, sparking a career change from electronics engineering and techno-commercial roles towards the environmental outcomes I care deeply about. During the degree, I became interested in the impacts of climate change on ecosystems and biodiversity. Bushfires in Australia emerged as a topic of particular interest due to their shifting ecosystem impacts under climate change. This interest led to completing a Masters project under the supervision of Dr. Hamish Clarke, focusing on the impact of bushfires and prescribed burning under future climate change on vegetation age class distribution. The project also provided a foundation for understanding bushfire management and fire ecology in Victoria when I recently worked in the Bushfire and Forest Services group of the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action during my current Victorian government graduate program.
Thesis – Impacts of bushfires and prescribed management on vegetation age classes in south-eastern Australia.
Fire regime changes primarily driven by climate change are a major challenge during the current biodiversity crisis. As fire regimes change, so does the distribution of age classes, which is an important measure of habitat quality for biodiversity in a fire-prone ecosystem. Older age classes that have not been burnt for long periods of time are particularly of high value and have increasingly become uncommon in south-eastern Australia. Two critical drivers of fire regime change and thus age class diversity are climate change and prescribed burning. Using two separate fire behaviour simulation datasets, this research project investigates the links between wildfire, prescribed burning, climate change and age class distribution. The first study based in NSW identified threshold limits for prescribed burning, beyond which the extent of older age classes declined substantially. The second study based in Victoria explored future age class diversity under two scenarios, one based on current prescribed burning treatment strategy and the other based on no treatment. This study found that the extent of older age classes and connectivity between them was higher in the no treatment scenario than the treatment scenario. The synthesis of findings indicates that older age class proportions in the future may be reduced when prescribed burning is introduced, however these reductions can be minimised by limiting prescribed burning below site specific thresholds.
