Phys.org - More Than 20% Of Australia's Forests Burned From September 2019 Through January 2020
Australia's wildfires have destroyed more than a fifth of the country's forests, making the blazes "globally unprecedented" following a years-long drought linked to climate change, researchers said Monday. Climate scientists are currently examining data from the disaster, which destroyed swathes of southeastern Australia, to determine to what extent they can be attributed to rising temperatures.
In a special edition of the journal Nature Climate Change, Australian researchers examined several other aspects of the blazes, including investigations into their extent and possible causes. One study showed that between September 2019 and January 2020 around 5.8 million hectares of broadleaf forest were burned in New South Wales and Victoria. This accounts for roughly 21 percent of the nation's forested area, making this fire season proportionately the most devastating on record.
"Halfway through Spring 2019 we realised that a very large part of the eastern Australian forest could be burned in this single season," Matthias Boer, from the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment at Western Sydney University, Penrith, told AFP. "The shock came from realising that this season was off the charts globally in terms of the percentage of the continental section of a forest biome that burned."
Boer said his study almost certainly underestimates the extent of forest loss as the island state of Tasmania was not covered in the data.
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https://phys.org/news/2020-02-bushfires-australia-forest.html