j.g. pausas' blog

Traditionally, Australian aboriginal people set fires in their landscape to facilitate hunting. A recent study has compared the landscape and fire history from two regions, one where aboriginal people live in a traditional way and the other where fires are “natural” and caused by lightning [1]. The results show that aborigines generate many small fires that are climate-independent, while lightning generates few large climate-driven fires. Anthropogenic fires are smaller even when climatic conditions cause huge fire in the lightning region. The authors suggest that this climate-buffering effects of aboriginal fires has likely been important for many species that benefit both from fine-grained mosaics of alternating resources and from enhanced protection from large catastrophic fires and the predators that hunt within them. This may explain the coincident decline of many small- to medium-sized mammals in the arid regions of Australia with the cessation of aboriginal hunting and burning. That is, the extinction of the aboriginal life style shifted fire regimes from small fires to large climate-driven fires, in a similar manner to the extinction of rural life styles in the Mediterranean Europe [2], and this shift promoted the extinciton of Australian mammals.

Fire Dreaming, by Malcolm Maloney Jagamarra [from www.aboriginalartcoop.com.au]

References

[1] Bird R.B., Codding B.F., Kauhanen P.G. & Bird D.W. (2012). Aboriginal hunting buffers climate-driven fire-size variability in Australia’s spinifex grasslands. PNAS, 109, 10287-10292. [pnas]

[2] Pausas J.G. & Fernández-Muñoz S. (2012). Fire regime changes in the Western Mediterranean Basin: from fuel-limited to drought-driven fire regime. Clim. Change, 110, 215-226.  [doi | springer | pdf]