Fire regimes are changing around the globe. Fire seasons are lengthening, high severity fires are occurring more often and in unexpected places. These shifts in components of the fire regime will have impacts on vegetation composition and patterns globally. In this project, we build towards predicting future fire regimes in south-eastern Australia and how fire responsive plant functional groups may respond to the predicted changes. We first used edaphic and climatic variables to build a predictive fuel model which does not rely on the current vegetation classes remaining stable under future climates. The fuel model is then used in the landscape fire regime simulator (FROST), alongside multiple predictions of future climate, to examine the relative roles of future fuel and future climate in driving shifts in the fire regime in south-eastern Australia. The range of future fire regimes are now being used to explore the impact of a changing fire regime on a range of plant functional groups. This work will improve our understanding of how components of the fire regime may change under future climates, and which groups of species may be most at risk of population decline under potential fire regime shifts.
Project timeline: 02/2018 – 03/2022