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Australia’s current wildfire crisis linked to colonial land-use change
Nature
(2026) Cite this article
The global wildfire crisis1 is often attributed to climate change, a framing that overlooks crucial historical drivers. Biomes at the forefront of this crisis, such as the temperate eucalypt forests of Australia, have seen alarming increases in large, intense wildfires in recent decades. Yet evidence of how colonial land-use change and the disruption of Indigenous fire use altered vegetation structure and fuel dynamics remains scarce. Here we reconstruct 1,000 years of vegetation and fire change in a temperate eucalypt forest in southeastern Australia. Before the British invasion (from 1788 ce), fire use by the Indigenous Gunaikurnai people maintained stable, open woodlands through frequent, fine-grained, low-temperature cultural burning. Colonial disruption drove cascading changes: increased fire temperature, a fourfold rise in eucalypt cover, a shift from open woodland to forest and increased soil erosion. These transformations preceded anthropogenic warming, indicating that the vulnerability of these forests to wildfire is shaped by colonial land-use legacies. By creating more flammable landscapes, colonial land use amplified the influence of climate change, suggesting a reinforcing feedback (the ‘catastrophic wildfire loop’) in which high-intensity wildfires raise fuel loads and further increase the likelihood of climate-driven fire. Integrating Indigenous knowledge into fire management is therefore essential to restoring resilience and mitigating future wildfire risk.
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The chronological (210Pb and 14C) data and the data on pollen count, pollen percentage, REVEALS land cover, pollen accumulation rate, macroscopic and microscopic charcoal, FTIR charcoal–temperature and magnetic susceptibility generated in this study are publicly available without restriction in the PANGAEA repository at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.995756, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence CC BY 4.0. The archaeological radiocarbon determinations underlying the summed probability density analysis are available from the SahulArch radiocarbon collection of the OCTOPUS database v.2.3 (https://octopusdata.org/). Precise archaeological site coordinates are withheld, as they are in the source database, to protect Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property and Indigenous Data Sovereignty. The radiocarbon determinations required to reproduce the analysis are provided in full. Previously published datasets used in this study are available as follows: the Australasian temperature reconstruction from the PAGES 2k Consortium global multiproxy database40; the FFDI reconstruction29; the colonial frontier massacres in Australia, 1788–1930 dataset42; relative pollen productivity estimates for southeastern Australia9; Victorian ecological vegetation class mapping138,139; Victorian fire history records from the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action38; and the National Vegetation Information System12.
Vegetation cover was reconstructed using the publicly available DISQOVER R package (REVEALSinR function; https://github.com/MartinTheuerkauf/disqover). Age–depth modelling used rbacon v.3.5.2; radiocarbon calibration used SHCal20 in OxCal v.4.4; Bayesian growth models used nimbleCarbon v.0.2.5; change-point analyses used changepoint v.2.3 and envcpt v.1.1.3; pollen zonation used rioja v.1.0-7; FTIR analogue matching used analogue v.0.18.1. All are available from CRAN. Custom R scripts supporting the change-point, FTIR, summed probability density and REVEALS analyses reported in this study are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21402874 (ref. 140).
Cunningham, C. X., Williamson, G. J. & Bowman, D.