Kicking off the Lignuum blog series off with some reflections after 10 days spent in Tasmania in late Jan 2025, hiking the Overland Track and exploring the North Western corner.
Some key thoughts and findings:
- Absolutely dire lack of tree cover across much of the farming landscape. Very little evidence of engagement with agroforestry concepts despite a fair bit of pure/traditional forestry in the area. Some of this can be explained by some structural challenges - heavy use of center pivot irrigation for one - makes it likely impossible to grow trees within the sweep of the pivot. It has been a dry January and I was confronted by how brown the landscape was in the absence of trees. If nothing else it seems short sighted in the face of impending climate change effects. They need to get busy planting, and planting soon. Road verges tended to be quite narrow and so even the corridors along road sides that I am used to in NSW were missing. Seabird populations seemed reasonable but many areas were eerily quiet, with only LBB scale birds present. Further digging required, I am aware of some growers working with Blackwood in particular but would like to understand if other groups are more active that I simply didn't encounter.
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Climate change and bushfire impacts in/around Cradle Mountain National Park. Part of the hike lead us through sections of the park that had experienced a bushfire ~18 months prior. There was healthy recovery in the buttongrass moorlands and some amount of lignotuber regrowth in eucs. More concerning were the mortalities evident in slow growing conifers like King Billy, Pencil and Celery Top Pines. Some killed were anecdotally reported to be in the 500+ year age classes. Missing from the picture was any evidence of management steps taken to address this fire risk in such a unique, slow growing and fire intolerant ecosystem. No methods without some costs/potential downsides but I would love to see some research and experimentation into active preservation in a few pockets, even if out of sight. Pruning to reduce ladder loads, physical removal of fuels from around the base of key trees, ecologically focused thinning over decades attempting to help some trees grow more quickly to a more fire resilient scale (not talking dramatic industrial mechanized thinning), mosaic burning, leaky weirs to boast hydration post fires.
- Related to this is a question about what do with fuel loads in some patches of Myrtle Beech dieback. I am not sufficiently familiar with the area and its history but I was surprised to see patches of what felt to me like quite significant recent dieback amongst the beeches. If this dieback has been caused or hastened by a general warming and drying out of the landscape the added fuel loads present again a heightened risk for the remaining trees. Complicating things still further is the lack of termite diversity in the area, who might help to contribute to removal of the material through consumption and decomposition.