Fire History of Blakes Opening

Blakes Opening, Huon River, in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area in Tasmania, is the focus of an ARC grant that aims to resolve one of the most vexed questions in Tasmanian landscape ecology: whether fire controls button grass boundaries (Bowman and Perry 2017).  This is a critically important question for the management of the TWWHA.

We collected sediment cores (using a standard D-section corer and mud-water interface corer [mwi]) from one waterbody in buttongrass sedgeland, one within the adjacent forest, and sampled another eroded riverbank section (see map). These samples will be analysed for macroscopic and microscopic charcoal, pollen grains will be identified, and the core will be dated using 14-C and 210-Pb to build a high-resolution chronology.  The methods will closely follow recent related research: Romanin et al. (2016)

The palaeoecology study will be combined with other investigations (including Lidar analysis) in a synthesis to determine the relative roles of fire and sols in controlling forest-sedgeland boundaries.