About the Project

As part of The Foundation for National Parks & Wildlife’s (FNPW) Landscape Resilience Program, the NCS have developed educational material to help landholders and communities implement Fire Wise strategies to prepare the natural and built environments against bushfires. “Fire Wise” strategies involve those that have community and biodiversity resilience at their core; by being Fire Wise, communities can continue to live in fire-prone areas and safeguard their local environments for future generations.

Managing ecosystems for the co-existence of fire, biodiversity and people is an ongoing challenge.

Being Fire Wise involves understanding the complex and nuanced relationships between bushfires and biodiversity, particularly between bushfires and rare, endemic, and short-ranged plant species – it’s the latter that are most threatened with extinction. Complementary to the Kangaroo Island Rare Plant Garden, this project aims to protect Kangaroo Island’s unique threatened plant species by mitigating the harmful effects of bushfire.

Funding for this project is supported by the Foundation for National Parks & Wildlife and has received grant funding from the Australian Government through the Preparing Australian Communities local stream.

There are several ways that ex-situ (off-site) threatened plant conservation may improve the resilience of species or vegetation communities: 

• The establishment of seed banks or living collections play a role as an “insurance” population or seed source in a situation where all wild individuals of a species have been depleted or lost.  
• When well planned, these seed banks and living collections can improve and conserve the genetic diversity of a species. Sometimes an ex-situ population can even host greater genetic diversity than the wild population, or maintain specific traits that have been lost from the wild population. 
• This genetic variation has the potential to be reintroduced to the wild population through plant translocations, and hence improve the species’ resilience to altered fire regimes. 

Why We Did It

We live in a time where bushfires are becoming increasingly frequent and intense. To better prepare communities and environments from the effects of bushfires, we must first understand the complex relationships between bushfire and our native Australian plant species, such as which plants are fire-resilient versus fire-sensitive. We must also understand the benefits in incorporating plants that are rare, threatened, and short-ranged.

While we can’t prevent all fires, we can take actions to decrease our vulnerability to them. We believe that resilience lies in community strength, which is guided by credible and understandable information. We want to activate and inspire communities to be the custodians of their own fire resilience strategies, and we understand that sometimes, it’s difficult to know where to turn. Our material provides landholders with the tools required to act, and live Fire Wise.