How Fire Regimes Shape Native Landscapes
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Many native landscapes have evolved alongside regular fire over an extremely long period, meaning their plant and animal communities are genuinely adapted to periodic burning rather than simply tolerating it as an occasional disruption, with some native plant species even requiring fire's heat or smoke to trigger seed germination successfully.
The specific pattern of fire, meaning how frequently it occurs, how intense it is and what season it typically happens in, shapes which species thrive in a given landscape over time, since different native species have adapted to quite different fire patterns depending on the particular ecosystem they originally evolved within.
Disrupting a landscape's natural fire pattern, whether through fire suppression that allows fuel to build up excessively or, conversely, through fire that is too frequent or too intense compared with historical patterns, can gradually shift which species are able to persist, sometimes favouring less fire adapted or invasive species over the long term.