Fire management guidelines for Kimberley pastoral rangelands : best management practice guidelines

Kimberley pastoralists operate in a highly fire-prone environment. Uncontrolled fires pose significant economic, safety, and environmental risks to pastoral enterprises. In contrast, the controlled use of fire can benefit land management, animal production and biodiversity conservation. For any given country type, the interactions of fire, grazing and weather have complex effects on both land condition and animal production. Although general guidelines on the use of fire are valuable, based as they are on a combination of experience and available research findings, they should best be regarded as providing a starting point. At the property level, an adaptive approach that incorporates monitoring of the effects of documented management actions is recommended. While this document deals with property-scale management of pastoral leases, there are many important issues arising from the characteristics of the broader, regional fire regime. These include community health and safety, biodiversity, and economic effects on the tourism and aviation industries. Regional fire regimes are particularly important for highly mobile fauna such as granivorous birds that depend on the availability of food resources across large areas. At the national level, the fire regime across the northern savannas affects greenhouse gas emissions and carbon storage in the landscape, potentially influencing the global climate