Experts say climate change is making it more difficult for agencies in Western Australia's Kimberley to continue their success reducing ecologically damaging wildfires.
The future of fire management in the region was explored at a community forum in Kununurra this week and heard evidence from scientists, ecologists and land managers.
Community leaders organised the event to help residents understand the decisions and techniques that guided fire management and boost collaboration between the stakeholders involved in planned burning.
While late-season wildfires have broadly decreased in the Kimberley in the past decade, the opposite is true in some isolated areas, especially near Kununurra.
In that time there's been a huge increase in planned burning, supported by more government funding, which has fuelled community concern about the potential impacts on the landscape.
Charles Darwin University fire researcher Rohan Fisher told the forum that fire management in the Kimberley was "best practice" because data showed it had led to fewer fires at the end of the dry season which often "scorch everything in their path".
But he warned the changing climate was making it harder to continue that trend.
"What I hear anecdotally across northern Australia and the Kimberley is incredibly severe fire conditions," he said.
"The fire managers on the ground who are battling against those sorts of fires are in despair about what they're coming up against."
Some Indigenous groups in the Kimberley earn revenue from fire management through carbon credits, but only if they can prove that their techniques lead to less emissions, measured against a complex baseline.
Mr Fisher said those groups, along with other stakeholders such as pastoralists, would have to continue to adapt to changing climatic conditions.
"Fire management is fundamentally very, very difficult," he said.
"Everyone's working as hard as they can to achieve the best outcomes and that's being made more difficult because of climate change."
Most planned burning in the Kimberley happens at the end of wet season when cooler, moist conditions mean fires are easily controlled and will extinguish overnight.
Large fires pose threat to mammals
Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions fire ecologist Ian Radford said the reduction of late-season wildfires had boosted mammal populations at conservation areas in the Kimberley's north.
He said the best burning techniques for animals, which needed ground cover, were still evolving.
"There's a lot of theories that fine-grain mosaics are the best," he said.
"But what we haven't realised until very recently is that mammals seem to do well in the large patches of long or unburnt vegetation."
He said shorter wet seasons had in recent years hampered efforts to conduct planned burning in areas of the Kimberley.
He said the areas had a global reputation for being pristine and ecologically intact.
"We're having failures of wet seasons … in 2018, 2019 and 2020 and that does make it more difficult to burn," Mr Radford said.
"It makes prescribed burning even more important because the alternative is where not much prescribed burning is done and then huge fires result."
Much of the forum highlighted new technologies including more detailed satellite fire mapping.
Department of Fire and Emergency Services Kimberley Acting Superintendent Steve Longo said crews were benefiting from more accurate information about fuel loads.
"We're using trail cameras, new to DFES, to capture daily grass conditions to calculate that grassload for the Australian fire danger rating system, as well as validating the satellite derived grass curing," he said.
