🚀 go-pugleaf

G'day Geoff,

In article <b18l9g$10jrgj$1@ID-90675.news.dfncis.de>, 
"Geoff" <gwinnet@hotmail.com> wrote:

[Looks like your newsreader likes shorter lines than mine! (Mine is 
set to wrap at 70 characters.)  Think I'll snip extraneous text to 
make things a little bit tidier; but the formatting seems to be 
stuffed beyond easy repair now.]

>"Phred" <ppnerk@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>news:b18jrl$10oelg$1@ID-151056.news.dfncis.de...
>> In article
><3e373697$0$8831$afc38c87@news.optusnet.com.au>,
>> "Terry Russell" <trochilus@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
>> >"Don H" <donlhumphries@bigpond.com> wrote in message
>> >news:KCBZ9.35338$jM5.90040@newsfeeds.bigpond.com...

[snip]

>> >> Water is a scarce resource.  What does it do? Smother
>the fire, and dampen
>> >> the fuel.  Any alternatives? Probably not.
>> >
>> >None really, apart from prayer, it can't hurt.
>> >
>> >Water falls from the sky, plants grow, water stops,
>plants dry,
>> >water stops for a long time, everything burns.
>> >
>> >There isn't a lot you can do to stop that cycle.
>> >There is nothing you can do to completely protect large
>areas
>> >of fuel.
>>
>> Well you could burn it more frequently and at a better
>time of year
>> for controlling the blaze.
>
>and change the vegetation make up substantially to more fire
>loving types
>
>>
>> Although this is the sort of thing that the aborigines did
>to manage
>> the landscape, it occurs to me that maybe they didn't just
>do it to
>> facilitate hunting etc. as we've been told.  Given the
>sort of fires
>> you get down in southern Oz at this time of year, wouldn't
>surprise me
>> to learn that the locals used to burn as a matter of
>community
>> survival as much as for any other reason.
>
>Or perhaps they burnt even less then everyone gives them
>credit for and this current event is of a natural and re
>occuring type - old age snow tree rings tend to support this
>view -
>
>when europeans moved in and burnt to "clean up the land" and
>get "a green pick" the whole makeup of the landscape strted
>to change with the bush "scrubbing up" and funny thing
>requiring a continuous need to burn to prevent the bush
>"scrubbing up"
>
>Early europeans into the high country were quite impressed
>by the "park like" appearance of the country and immediately
>assumed it was because of regular burning and using good
>logic decided if it was burnt more it could only get better
>! see above.
>
>A reasonable body of evidence seems to suggest that a lot of
>this country was in fact in a climax community of tall open
>forest with grassy understory and we disrupted that by
>regular burning and that it would will take between 50 and
>100 years to return to that climax community

[snip]

Don't know about your part of the country, but the general consensus 
in the north seems to be that grazing is the culprit in causing the 
thickening up of woody species.  By virtue of removing a lot of the 
herbage layer through grazing, the fire regime becomes too mild to 
kill seedlings and suckers of the fire tolerant woodland species.

There is some work going on to see if spelling a paddock to build up 
the fuel load will help in controlling these "woody weeds", but I'm 
not familiar with the current trends in this work.

Of course, the "natural" fire regime in the north seems to be 
fundamentally different to that in the south in that we very rarely 
see fires "topping" in the woodland... Different species?  Lower 
density of stems?  Different climate (the hot season is also the wet 
season -- when we get a wet season :)?  A combination of these?


Cheers, Phred.

-- 
ppnerkDELETE@THISyahoo.com.INVALID