Australia's bushfire gloom

After ten consecutive years of drought, the last three severe and this current summer breaking almost all records for high temperatures and low rainfall, Australia is suffering bushfires of unprecedented intensity. A fire danger rating of 50 is extreme, 100 uncontrollable: the fire danger rating on February 6 was 180, and some reports have it as high as 400 on the next day, which is being called Black Saturday. The human toll has been devastating, but so, too, has the toll on the environment. The extraordinary capacity of the Australian bush to regenerate in the aftermath of fire is well documented. For some Australian plants, fire stimulates flowering so that, not long after, the scorched ground is blanketed in a profusion of flowers like a desert after the rain. Some woody plants, the so-called sprouters, regrow from either aerial or subterranean regenerative buds, even after 100 per cent defoliation. Trees with blackened trunks yet thriving crowns make quite a striking sight. Still other plants regenerate from seeds in the soil or carried in from surrounding, unburnt, areas. In some families, among them the Myrtaceae, which include the eucalypts, seed release is accelerated by fire, sometimes to such an extent that the regrowth is likened to a wheat field. Some species of the Banksia family, named after the great botanist Joseph Banks, may even be reliant on fire to release seed and may therefore become locally extinct if fires are too infrequent. Intriguingly, some plant species that were thought to be locally extinct have been rediscovered after fires. One such is the vulnerable species Leiocarpa gatesii, or wrinkled buttons, which was found near Lorne in Victoria after the infamous Ash Wednesday fires of