The Australian “Black Spring” bushfires of 2023 are not well known. Unlike the 2019-20 Black Summer fires, fires in the desert regions receive little public attention outside of their immediate area of impact. And yet the fires in Australian tropical savannas and northern spinifex deserts in late 2023 were Australia’s biggest in more than a decade, around eight times more extensive than the Black Summer fires along eastern and southern Australia.
A closer look at the Black Spring 2023 fires has found that, despite their size and potential impacts on cultural and biodiversity values, they are not acknowledged as a significant national event and barely registered in the national or global media. The limited media that did occur focused on the threat of fire to the small town of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory, but most Australians remain unaware of the existence or full scale of the fires.
The research describes the extent of the 2023 northern desert fires, and their relationship to lightning strikes, the most common cause of ignitions for these fires.
It also examines fire spread patterns to explore whether the emerging, large-scale fire management programs being delivered by Indigenous ranger groups in one part of these northern deserts influenced the fires.
Wildfires are common across Northern Australia. The annual monsoons bring large amounts of rainfall each Wet Season resulting in extensive grass growth that, come Dry Season, quickly become high fuel loads ripe for dry lightning and other sources of ignition.
In 2022-23 widespread and prolonged rain occurred in Australia’s northern deserts and some parts of the low rainfall tropical savannas. The rain caused biomass accumulation that led to extensive desert fires in the following Dry season (June–November 2023). Whereas the average annual fire extents is around 15 percent – these fires burnt around 40 percent.
Lead researcher Rohan Fisher, a senior research fellow at the Northern Institute at Charles Darwin University, told Wildfire Today: “2023 was Australia’s biggest bushfire season in more than a decade. Fires burned across an area eight times as big as the 2019–20.”
The data calculating the annual fire extent data was obtained from the North Australia Fire Information (NAFI) service (http://firenorth.org.au), which provides 250m resolution fire mapping based on the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS).
The researchers stress that these large fires were not inevitable, despite the confluence of high rainfall, fuel loads and lightning. The study found prescribed burns by Indigenous Ranger Groups in some areas had a strong influence on the fire extent.
In the northern savannas, annual, large-scale prescribed burning programs over the past 10–20 years have transformed fire patterns by reducing fire size, frequency and severity of fire, and smoothing out fluctuations in fire extents between years, including in 2023
As Fisher told Wildfire Today, after just a few years of work the rangers of the Great Sandy Desert have made a measurable difference to wildfire spread.
“For many thousands of years, Indigenous people managed fuel loads across these vast landscapes. However, efforts have only just begun to bring good fire management back into these landscapes in a coordinated and large-scale way.
“Our research showed that despite the scale of the fires in 2023, the work by indigenous rangers was effective in reducing the impact of these fires. They need continued support to support the health of this continent for all Australians.”
Read the full article in the International Journal of Wildland Fire.
