Dinosaur trees at risk for next bushfire season
Last summer’s daring firefighting efforts to save the world’s last stand of wollemi pines prevented significant loss of the larger, mature trees but left many juvenile plants severely burnt, prompting expert calls for permanent fire-dampening measures to protect the ancient grove.
Of the total of 49 large trees, just four escaped without some scorching but most of the stems of less than two metres in height were badly burnt, with only a small portion so far beginning to resprout.
One year on from the remarkable attempt to shield the secret location from the giant Gospers Mountain fire, the Sydney Morning Herald can reveal researchers studying the trees’ recovery fear more frequent and intense bushfires from climate change could doom a species that dates from the age of dinosaurs.
Berin Mackenzie, a member of the fire crew and one of the ecologists leading the post-fire study, said ‘‘extraordinary efforts’’ by the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Rural Fire Service definitely prevented the fire reaching the canopy of most of the larger trees.
‘‘We definitely breathed a sigh of relief,’’ Mackenzie said. ‘‘It was an excellent sign that they would recover.’’ Of concern, though, has been the state of the seedlings and smaller juvenile plants, with most trees shorter than 8 metres showing 100 per cent canopy scorching.
While laboratory testing had indicated smaller plants would recover from fire, many of them are yet to do so in the wild.
Only 2 per cent of the plants between 5 centimetres to 2 metres have started to resprout.
‘‘We’d expect them to have a good capacity to resprout,’’ Mackenzie said. ‘‘So far, we’ve observed very few resprouting.’’
Mackenzie cautioned that, as the pines are coming out of drought and seasonal in their growth patterns, it was too soon to declare the one-third of juvenile plants yet to recover to be dead. – Nine