2013 Essays

Fire in the Top End: Coupled Human/Natural System Conservation

Drew, Joshua Adam

One of the things I am really enjoying about this semester is teaching my graduate seminar in conservation biology. It has been fun going back and reading the classics and also expanding out into the newer literature. Since I am also teaching a class in marine conservation I am trying to pay special attention to non-marine topics for regular flavor conservation biology
There are few topics I consider more ‘non-marine’ than fire ecology, and this recent paper by Trauernicht et al. in Ecology and Evolution does a great job of looking at a conservation issue with multiple moving points. In this paper “Cultural legacies, fire ecology, and environmental change in the Stone Country of Arnhem Land and Kakadu National Park, Australia” they look at the interactions between (pay attention now) Aboriginal cultural practices including both 1) fire management via prescribed burning and 2) incorporation of Water Buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) and 3) Australian government prescribed fire management across two areas. Get all that? Right, it’s a complex story.