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Unprecedented burn area of Australian mega forest fires

Nature Climate Change volume 10, pages 171–172 (2020)Cite this article

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To the Editor — Between September 2019 and early January 2020, around 5.8 million hectares of mainly temperate broadleaf forest were burned in New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria (VIC) in eastern Australia by a series of mega fires. Many of the fires have exceeded 100,000 ha and continued to burn for weeks after their ignition1. The Gospers Mountain fire near Sydney has burned more than 510,000 ha since ignition by lightning on 26 October 2019; it is the largest forest fire recorded in Australia and continues to burn in late January 2020.

Eastern Australia’s temperate broadleaf forests, dominated by eucalypts, are among the most fire-prone in the world, and major fires are relatively common2,3, yet annually only small percentages of this forest biome burn, typically below 2% even in the more extreme fire seasons4,5.

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Fig. 1: Annual burned area percentages for continental forest biomes (2000–2019).
Fig. 2: Forest area in critically dry fuel state, eastern Australia (1990–2019).

References

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment, via the NSW Bushfire Risk Management Research Hub.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University, Penrith, New South Wales, Australia

    Matthias M. Boer

  2. School of Life Science and Engineering, Southwest University of Science and Technology, Mianyang, China

    Víctor Resco de Dios

  3. Joint Research Unit CTFC–AGROTECNIO, Lleida, Spain

    Víctor Resco de Dios & Ross A. Bradstock

  4. Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia

    Ross A. Bradstock

Authors
  1. Matthias M. Boer
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  2. Víctor Resco de Dios
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  3. Ross A. Bradstock
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Correspondence to Matthias M. Boer.

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Peer review information Nature Climate Change thanks Douglas Kelley and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Boer, M.M., Resco de Dios, V. & Bradstock, R.A. Unprecedented burn area of Australian mega forest fires. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 171–172 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0716-1

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