New epicormic shoots grow from burned eucalyptus trunks. Photo: AMLR.

The 2019-20 bushfire event has had a devastating effect in Australia, burning over 19.4 mio hectares of land (7.7mio in densely populated southern Australia).

In South Australia, the estimate is that nearly 300,000 hectares burnt (at the time of this blog). This includes around half of Kangaroo Island (more than 200,000 hectares) and more than 20,000 hectares in the Cudlee Creek Fire in the Adelaide Hills.

The Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium have received many enquiries asking how the burned and damaged vegetation will recover, if plants should be replanted or sown, or what people can do to help.

A message from the Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium Director Dr. Lucy Sutherland can be read here.

To provide more information to the public, we have decided to launch a series of blog posts about the effect of fire on the Australian environment, as well as a separate page on this blog (see also tab on the top of the blog), where links to existing web-resources and publications are posted. We will up-date this regularly.

The effects of the bushfires on Kangaroo Island. Graphic prepared at the end of Jan. 2020 by DEW.