mandragara wrote:How long does it take the bush to recover from big burns like this? Are half of NSW's national parks going to be burnt out wastelands for the next few years?
Michael Doherty has done some excellent research using vegetation surveys to answer this question around Canberra following the massive 2003 fires. If anyone's interested I can try and track it down- bits and pieces are available online, but I'm not sure how much. I know he's been taking regular series of photos of his many points, so you can visibly see the vegetation changes.
Basically, the Eucalypts will probably be fine, they'll just take a while to grow back from epicormic buds, and there'll likely be a flush shrubs that respond to fire in the meantime. Unless they're one of the species of Eucalypts that only regenerate from seed after fires (obligate re-seeders), in which case, they'll probably be fine, but have to grow back from seed and take decades to return to their former state. However, if there's another fire before the re-seeders reach maturity, they'll all be killed and not grow back on a landscape scale. Also unless the fire was very intense, at which point all the Eucs have to grow back from seed or lignotubers.
The rainforest very much depends on how intense the fire was locally, and how damp the rainforest was when it burnt. Even the big, very hot fires can have a surprising degree of spatial variability in how intensely it burns a given patch of (rain)forest. Some of it will be stuffed, and replaced with wet sclerophyll forest tho, and then, if that isn't burnt for 500 years or so, it might transition back into rainforest. Hopefully most of it will be ok tho!