This is yet more evidence supporting the view I've long held on forest fires: let them burn, folks. Extinguishing forest fires is a bad strategy for preventing them. If you keep putting out the fires, they'll just get bigger when they do burn through. And while trees can easily survive a typical fire, if the underbrush has built up for too long (thanks to humans putting out all the fires), when it lights up, it will kill all the trees and devastate the forest.
The nation learned this in 1988 when a raging fire burned up a third of Yellowstone National Park. If they had let previous fires burn through the forest, the 1988 fire would have been no big deal.
It is the epitome of arrogance when humans think they have the right to go into forests and extinguish fires. They think they know better than nature? Nature has been starting fires (thanks to lightning) for as long as there have been trees. And now, all of a sudden, man comes along and thinks he should be putting out all those fires?
Let me tell you something: nature knows what works best, and forests are supposed to burn every few years. It's absolutely essential for the health of the forest, and as we see from this research, it's also the only way many trees can reproduce.
In fact, and this may sound radical, but it isn't, a person who starts a forest fire where other people have been artificially extinguishing them is actually helping the forest. Of course, the best policy is to just let lightning do the job for you, then stand back and let it burn. Just because there's a fire doesn't mean it's bad.
PhD student Gavin Flematti and colleagues from the University of Western Australia published their research online today ahead of print publication in the journal Science.
Many Australian plants, like the acacia, depend on the heat from fires to crack open their seeds before they can germinate.
But bushfire smoke can play an even bigger role in seed germination.
So, since the 1990s scientists have been trying to identify which of the thousands of chemicals in bushfire smoke is the crucial trigger.
The chemical germinates seeds from many types of plants, Flematti said, not just fire-dependent species.