The Green House
Arising from the ashes of the bushfires, a citizen-science project aims to capture the ways our wilderness regenerates,
Just days after she lost her home to the horrific bushfires in January, ecologist Casey Kirchhoff wandered around her charred block of land in the NSW Southern Highlands. Tree limbs were still smouldering and heavy smoke made it difficult to breathe, but even in this moment of intense devastation, she saw something heartening.
“I noticed sedges and rushes already sprouting in a wetter area of our property,” she says. “There had been about five centimetres of growth in a couple of days. I knew these plants would come back, but the speed at which they did was quite incredible.” Then she spotted shoots unfurling from singed ferns and vividgreen foliage emerging on grass trees. “There were wombats scratching around in their burrows, gang-gang cockatoos flying in and brilliant orange fungi was popping up everywhere.”
The sight of the bush coming back to lifeawakenedasenseofoptimisminCasey – it offered tangible proof that after fire there is recovery – but it also saw her kick very firmly into scientist mode. “I realised the importance of monitoring the regeneration of our biodiversity in the wake of these fires. I was walking around thinking, ‘Oh, my God, there’s so much going on here’. There are only so many ecologists in Australia, there was no way we could capture the enormity of what’s going to happen after these fires.”
It was this line of thinking that inspired Casey, a PhD candidate at the University of NSW’s Centre for Ecosystem Science, to establish the Environment Recovery Project. “Anyone in fire-affected areas of Australia can participate, no matter what their scientific or plant-identification knowledge or their photography skills. All people need to do is download the iNaturalist mobile app to their phone and take a photo of, say, a burnt tree and upload the image to the app.”
The more observations collected via the app (which can be used offline once downloaded), the more information scientists will have about the impact these bushfires have had on local ecosystems. “This is particularly important because the fires covered such a huge area and occurred over an extended period of time,” says Casey. Every time someone takes a photo using the app, their location and the time it was taken are noted. This information can then be matched with satellite fire-map images to build a comprehensive bank of data that will help scientists better understand the behaviour of fires as well as their effect on the environment.
Professor Richard Kingsford, director of the Centre for Ecosystem Science, says the Environment Recovery Project gives Australians the chance to contribute meaningfully to the understanding of how our environment can recover. “The key aims of this initiative are to understand which plant species are sprouting or growing seedlings and to calculate when and how animals return to burnt areas. The project will also highlight which species are struggling to recover and might need our help.”
At the time of writing, the Environment Recovery Project (which is expected to run for a few years) had been up and running for less than a week with 400 people living near fire-affected areas signed up. These citizen scientists have already uploaded more than 200 photos.
“People are writing beautifully detailed descriptions. You can tell they’re really connected to the areas they’re sending observations from, and it’s clear they want to help,” says Casey. To her, this is another representation of hope in the face of tragedy. “While we rebuild our home I’m looking forward to seeing the recovery of the bush around where I live and more broadly across Australia with the help of our citizen scientists. This is a great way for people to contribute to post-bushfire recovery.”
“REGENERATION AFTER FIRE ISN’T A QUICK PROCESS FOR EVERY SPECIES. IT CAN GO ON FOR DECADES OR EVEN CENTURIES, SO THE MORE WE CAN LEARN, THE BETTER.” Casey Kirchhoff