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Queensland’s protected areas expanded
Minister for the Environment and the Great Barrier Reef and Minister for Science and Youth Affairs The Honourable Meaghan Scanlon
The Palaszczuk Government has announced more than 4,600 hectares of land will become protected habitat for wildlife, while half-a-million dollars will be provided to dozens of property owners across the state to safeguard nature refuges.
Visiting 30 hectares of land today on the southern Gold Coast to be declared a new nature refuge, Environment Minister Meaghan Scanlon said the move would ensure more crucial habitat for Queensland’s native wildlife with 4,400 hectares to be added to the state’s national parks, 144 hectares to nature refuges, and 82 hectares to conservation parks – equivalent to 8,500 football fields.
Fire management plan nearly 25 years in the making outlines how controlled burns can prevent forest fires Firefighters train for a prescribed burn at Otis Pike Preserve in Calverton. (Credit: Polly L. Weigand)
When you think of the best way to fight forest fires, you probably don’t think “by starting another fire.”
But that’s actually the method being used.
The Central Pine Barrens Commission has released its “Prescribed Fire Management Plan,” the goal of which is to reduce forest fires by burning off the “fuel” that dead branches and undergrowth provide.
“It may seem ironic that fire is the best tool we have to prevent devastating wildfires and ensure the continued health of the spectacular Central Pine Barrens region, but that is the case for many reasons,” the commission’s interim executive director, Judy Jakobsen, said in an interview.
Counterintuitively the knee- and waste-high flames crept through matted and cured grasses straight into the wind coming out of the southwest.
This is what firefighters refer to as âbacking.â On Thursday, in a grassy flat just outside the cottonwoods south of the Gros Ventre River floodplain, âbackingâ was just what Teton Interagency Fire assistant fire management officer Bill Mayer wanted to see.
âIf youâve got a good, continuous fuel bed, itâll do that,â Mayer said. âFor the most part, itâs just backing on its own.â
Firefighters corralling predictably moving flames set the scene for the National Elk Refugeâs first prescribed burn since early in the first term of the George W. Bush administration. The two-decade-long absence of flames from the landscape â best known as a wintering ground for thousands of elk and hundreds of bison â resulted from a lack of funds and resources. But ahead of this springtime burning