Supporting your bush after fire

If fire has just been through your place, we’re sorry. Losing bush you’ve known for years, whether you planted it or spent years walking through it, is a real loss. We know your first priorities will be the urgent things like fences to fix, stock to sort out and insurance forms to fill in. But we also know that many landholders care deeply about the wildlife and plants that share their place, and want to know how to help them recover.

Most of the bush in this part of Victoria has been burning and coming back for a very long time, and much of what looks dead right now is already getting ready to regrow. To know where our interventions can be most helpful, we need to understand what a natural fire recovery looks like in our highly fire-adapted landscape, and where this natural recovery can get off track.

That is what this guide aims to do: help you identify where you can most help your bush recover.

The five questions

The guide is built around the most common questions people have asked us after the 2024 and 2025 bushfires:

1. Was this a ‘good fire’ or a ‘bad fire’ for my block? What sort of country is this, and how does it respond to fire? (Part 1)
2. What should I look out for? What should recover, in what order, and how long will it take? (Part 2)
3. Is my block recovering the way it should? How to track what survived and what is coming back. (Part 3)
4. What should I actually do? Weeds, pests, hollows, thinning, replanting — and in what order. (Part 4)
5. So what do I do first? (Part 5)

What this guide doesn’t cover

This is about native bush on your place, not the garden around your house. For defendable space, plant flammability, firewise garden design and what to put near the buildings, see resources such as the CFA’s Landscaping for Bushfire guide or the Pyrenees Firewise Garden Guide, which Project Platypus wrote with Pyrenees Shire Council in 2026.

We also don’t cover:

• Fire management — planned burning, permits, fuel reduction. Talk to your local CFA for information about planned burns on your property.
• Hazard trees and what you are permitted to clear. Burnt trees near buildings, tracks and fencelines are a safety and regulatory question rather than a habitat one, and the rules vary with your zoning. Ask your council or a local arborist. We do ask you to keep standing dead trees where they can safely be kept, to preserve habitat (4.5), but safety comes first.
• Agricultural recovery — fencing, stock, pasture and soils. Talk to your local CMA or Agriculture Victoria.

After bushfires affected private bushland along with national parks in the summers of 2024 and 2025, three of our Wimmera Landcare networks were funded to develop a program to assist folks caring for bushfire-affected native habitat on private property.

The Wimmera Landcare Fire Recovery Partnership Project involved selecting nine demonstration properties across the three Landcare regions, burnt by the 2024 Pomonal–Dadswells Bridge fire and the 2025 Grampians and Little Desert fires. Over 2026, we worked with the landholders to try out simple methods for answering those big questions after fire, and to take on-ground steps to help the bush recover.

We tried out several different ways to monitor the return of biodiversity after fire on these properties. This included automated bird listening stations and trail cameras, seasonal surveys with local bird experts, thermal-scope night surveys, simple counts of hollow-bearing tree density, recording native plant species as they returned, and mapping weeds. We then used those results to help each landholder get started with on-ground interventions, including nest boxes and weed control.

Everything we learned from those nine properties has been compiled into this guide, designed to support anyone who cares for fire-affected native bush on their property.

The project was led by Project Platypus with Wimmera Catchment Management Authority, Horsham District Landcare Network and Hindmarsh Landcare, and was jointly funded by the Commonwealth and Victoria under the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements through DEECA’s Grampians Recovery Package.

This project was funded as the Victorian Government recognised that private landholders also play an important role in protecting biodiversity on private land after fire, just as Parks Victoria looks after the park. Your block, however small, is part of how this landscape recovers.

Thank you to our nine demonstration site landholders, to local Landcare groups, and to the Stawell and Pomonal Men’s Sheds.

We live in fire-adapted country. The bush around Gariwerd and the Little Desert has been burning and coming back for a very long time, and many of its plants and animals rely on fire to renew. So why do ecologists get so worried when big fires come through?

The answer lies in the concept of habitat loss and fragmentation. Before 1750, native vegetation covered this whole region: grasslands, grassy and heathy woodlands, forests and wetlands, all joined up. Today most of it has been cleared, and what remains sits mainly in a few big national parks, such as Gariwerd, the Little Desert and the Pyrenees, with very little bush left in between. The parks have become islands.

Then, in the space of two fire seasons, bushfires burnt around 70% of the Grampians National Park and around 60% of the Little Desert National Park.²⁸ In a joined-up landscape, animals could move into unburnt country next door and come back later. In a fragmented one, there often isn’t anywhere to go.

Before 1750

Today

Today, with the 2024–25 fires

Much of the land around the parks, near fire edges, is privately owned: remnant habitat on bush blocks, and old habitat trees along roadsides and in paddocks. It could be that your block was only partially affected by fire and still has some intact mature remnant bushland; that country is the refuge wildlife moves into while the parks recover. Or even if your block burnt completely, it may be nearer to bush that survived, or it may have burnt less fiercely than the park thanks to the efforts of firefighters. This means your block may be right on the interface where animals and plants start moving back into the burnt country. What you do there can help that return.

To get to know your block, there are a few things you can look up that tell you what sort of habitat it has, and how that habitat responds to fire.

Fire ecology is shaped by vegetation type, which is shaped by climate and by soil, which in turn is shaped by geology. So the first step is to find your overall climate, soil and geology type: your bioregion.

What is a bioregion?

A bioregion is a big stretch of country that has broadly similar landforms, rocks, soils and climate, so it grows a recognisable mix of plants and supports a recognisable mix of animals.

Victoria is divided into 28 bioregions. They are drawn at a landscape scale, tens to hundreds of kilometres across, so your bioregion tells you what kind of country you are in, not exactly what grows on your block. That finer detail is your vegetation type (section 1.2). The bioregion is the big picture it sits inside.

This guide covers five bioregions: the four that cover the fire-affected country of the Wimmera and Grampians,¹ and the Lowan Mallee of the Little Desert.²⁷

Now use the lookup tool to find out your own bioregion.

Follow along · the example block near Pomonal

The example block sits in the Greater Grampians bioregion: uplifted, faulted sedimentary country on the edge of the ranges. The whole block is on colluvium: gravel, sand and silt washed down the gullies from the ranges in recent geological time. Sandy, well-drained ground like that grows heathy vegetation, which is flammable most of the year, burns hot, and depends on fire to regenerate.

Because bioregions are mapped at a very large landscape scale, on their own they don’t say a great deal about how your block responds to fire. For that we need its vegetation types. But we start with the bioregion because it tells us which vegetation types we might find. So now let’s step down into your bioregion’s vegetation types, in the next section.

How often your bush should burn, what should return on its own, and what plants are appropriate to plant there all depend on which vegetation type you have.

Every bioregion has a list of possible vegetation types. A vegetation type is a particular community of plants that grows wherever the same conditions repeat, such as the same soil, slope, drainage and rainfall. Each one has its own recognisable mix of trees, shrubs, grasses and herbs. A single block can have several vegetation types side by side, set by changes in the landscape, such as heathy woodland on a sandy rise and herb-rich woodland down in a damp gully.

Victoria’s official name for these vegetation types is Ecological Vegetation Class, or EVC. The state has sorted all its native bush into about 300 of these classes, each with a name and a number, such as Heathy Woodland (48) or Plains Grassy Woodland (55). It has mapped them across Victoria, both as the bush stands today and as it was before 1750. The conservation status listed for each EVC is based on how much of it has been lost since 1750.

Once you know your EVC, you can find out how it responds to fire. The state has sorted every EVC into a fire division: a group of EVCs that behave in much the same way when fire comes through. Victoria’s 300 or so EVCs fall into 32 of these divisions.² Within one division, the bush recovers at about the same pace and has the same sensitive plants to protect. So instead of setting fire rules for every vegetation type, ecologists set them once for each division: how soon after one fire the next can safely come, how long the bush can go without fire, and how long it takes to grow from young regrowth to old bush.

With that knowledge, you can look up your own EVCs and fire divisions.

Follow along · the example block near Pomonal

Most of the bush on the example block is mapped as Heathy Woodland (EVC 48), 67 hectares or about 40% of the block. Another 22 hectares is Shrubby Woodland (EVC 282) and 7 hectares Damp Sands Herb-rich Woodland (EVC 3). All three are listed as Least Concern in this bioregion. The other 73 hectares, 43% of the block, has no native vegetation mapped: the cleared paddocks you can see on the aerial photo.

Switch to Pre-1750 vegetation and the whole block was bush: 78% Heathy Woodland, 17% Shrubby Woodland and 5% Damp Sands Herb-rich Woodland. That tells you which plants would be best suited to those areas if you revegetated (section 4.9).

The lookup tool matches Heathy Woodland and Shrubby Woodland to the Grassy / Heathy Dry Forest fire division, and Damp Sands Herb-rich Woodland to Forby Forest. This is where we learn how those vegetation types respond to fire. For example, Grassy / Heathy Dry Forest is fire-dependent: much of its regeneration is triggered by fire, and a good deal of what grows there is killed outright and comes back only from seed.

Where this comes from. DEECA’s 2005 and pre-1750 Ecological Vegetation Class mapping, with Bioregional Conservation Status. To look at the source maps yourself, open NatureKit, search your address, and turn on 2005 Ecological Vegetation Classes or Pre-1750 Ecological Vegetation Classes.

At this stage we know our block’s vegetation types and how they are expected to respond to fire.

So now we need the block’s fire history. How the bush responds to the most recent fire depends on how often it has burnt before. We are interested in the interval between fires, not just any single fire.

The lookup tool uses the Victorian Government’s fire history maps, which go back to 1939. Before you look up your fire history, there are a few things to keep in mind.

Not all fires have been mapped. Coverage is best for large fires on public land. Small and older fires on freehold are recorded patchily. A blank is not evidence that nothing burnt.

The map shows perimeters, not severity. The fire history maps don’t show the difference between an extremely hot fire that removed entire canopy layers and a cooler, patchier fire. Ground shown inside a fire boundary may still contain patches that didn’t burn. The state has separate severity mapping for some recent fires, modelled from aerial and satellite imagery, and the lookup tool uses it where it exists.³⁴

Follow along · the example block near Pomonal

The state record shows four fires on the example block: a bushfire in 1939, a small 1990 planned burn that caught 11 hectares in one corner, the 2006 Mt Lubra fire, and the 2025 Yarram Gap Road fire. The table gives each fire’s season and name, whether it was a bushfire or a planned burn, and how much of the block falls inside its mapped boundary. The 1939 and 2006 fires covered the whole block. The 2025 fire covered 98 hectares, 58% of it, and the rest escaped.

Clicking the 2025 fire turns the part of the block it burnt yellow, and Show the whole fire on the map zooms out to show the block was a small piece of a fire that ran through much of the Grampians.

The last column, How severe was it here?, is filled in from the state’s severity mapping where it exists. None of these fires has severity mapping on this block, so it reads Not sure. If you saw the fire, or the ground straight after it, set it yourself: High means crowns burnt with few unburnt patches, Patchy means the canopy was mostly intact.

Looking at the surrounding landscape

Your block’s fire history means more once you know what happened to the bush around it. At the bottom of section 1.3, the lookup tool tells you how much of the native bush within 5 km burnt in your block’s most recent fire. On the example block it reads: “the 2025 fire burnt 79% of the native bush within 5 km of your block and 70% of your block’s bush.” In this case, what happened on the block is similar to what happened across the larger landscape: most of the area burnt, with 20 to 30% of the land left as unburnt refuges. We will expand on what this might mean in section 2.1.

Where this comes from. DEECA’s fire history records, published on DataVic as Fire History Records of Fires across Victoria and Fire History showing the number of times areas have been burnt.³ Forest Fire Management Victoria also publishes maps of the major bushfires since 1939. If you’d rather not use the lookup tool, your Landcare facilitator, CMA or council can map your block’s fire history in a few minutes.

Now we come back to the big question: was this a ‘good fire’ or a ‘bad fire’ for my block?

It’s not so much whether the fire was good or bad, but whether this fire, at this severity, this long after the last one, is something your more sensitive plant species can re-establish after.

Victorian fire ecologists answer this question with two numbers for each fire division: a minimum and a maximum tolerable fire interval.²

The minimum tolerable fire interval

This is the shortest gap between fires a vegetation community can take without losing species. It is set by the plants fire kills outright, which return only from seed: the “obligate seeders”. These include most local peas, wattles, banksias and hakeas. A seeder must grow, flower, and build a seed store before the next fire. If fire returns first, there is no seed left and the species is gone from that patch.² We will talk more about these species in section 2.2.

There are two minimums, because severity matters as much as timing:²

• After a high-severity fire — crowns burnt, few unburnt patches — more of the existing seed bank may have been destroyed, and there are fewer surviving plants. It takes much longer for the seed bank to build back up.
• After a low-severity, patchy fire — canopy largely intact, plenty of unburnt islands — the minimum tolerable fire interval is shorter. Sensitive species may have survived in the unburnt patches, where the seed bank and new seed were left untouched. These patches carry them through while they regrow from seed in the burnt ground.²

The maximum tolerable fire interval

This is the longest a community can go without fire before it starts to lose the species that rely on fire to grow and reproduce.² Grasslands that go too long without fire can be choked out by their own tussocks and lose their herbs. Some species won’t germinate until smoke or heat triggers them. A long absence of fire is not automatically a good outcome.

Where these numbers come from

A vegetation type contains a hundred or more plant species, but of those there may only be ten to fifteen that are sensitive to fire coming either too soon or not soon enough. Those species, called key fire response species, are what set the minimum and the maximum. Everything else in the community can tolerate a wider range.¹²

For example, Grassy / Heathy Dry Forest is the most widespread fire division in the Grampians foothills. It recovers fast and much of its regeneration is fire-cued. It is generally healthiest when fires come no sooner than 15 years apart and no more than 45. But large parts of the Grampians National Park have now been burnt severely twice inside fifteen years, which is when the risk grows of its seeders beginning to drop out. After the 2006 Mt Lubra fire, Grampians Rice-flower took two years to first flower and Grampians Bitter-pea took three. Flowering is just the first step: from there they need to set seed, and repeat that over enough seasons to build up a large enough seed bank before the next fire.³

Follow along · the example block near Pomonal

The verdict for the example block: “Your bush is recovering from its last fire and within its tolerable range. Another fire before 2040 would come too soon.”

Underneath, the tool draws a fire timeline for each part of the block with its own fire history. The dots are fires, and the bar between two dots is the gap between them, coloured by the verdict on that gap: teal, within the tolerable interval; amber, within it only if the earlier fire was patchy; orange-red, shorter than sensitive plants may tolerate; purple, longer than they may tolerate. The hatched stretch after the last fire is the time the seeders need to rebuild, ending in the first year another fire would clear the minimum. The square beside each timeline, and that part of the block on the map, take the colour of its most pressing status.

The example block splits into four parts:

• 56 hectares of Grassy / Heathy Dry Forest (Heathy and Shrubby Woodland) burnt in 1939, 2006 and 2025. The 19-year gap from 2006 to 2025 clears the 15-year minimum, but not by much. The 67 years before that shows purple: longer than the 45-year maximum, which is its own kind of signal. It is still recovering, and another fire before 2040 would come too soon.
• 11 hectares of the same division also caught the 1990 planned burn, so its gaps run 51, 16 and 19 years. Same verdict: recovering until 2040.
• 22 hectares escaped the 2025 fire. Last burnt in 2006, it cleared its minimum in 2021 and is now within its tolerable range.
• 7 hectares of Damp Sands Herb-rich Woodland (Forby Forest) also escaped in 2025. Its 67-year gap is well inside Forby Forest’s 150-year maximum.

The 2040 date assumes the 2025 fire was severe, because the record doesn’t say; where severity isn’t known, the tool always assumes the worse case. If the landholder sets it to patchy in section 1.3, the minimum drops to 10 years and 2040 becomes 2035.

Vegetation growth after a fire progresses in recognisable stages. Fire ecologists call these growth stages, and count them from the last fire. No stage is the “good” one. Different plants and animals prefer different growth stages, so the highest biodiversity generally comes with a mosaic of growth stages.

How long each stage lasts

How long each stage lasts depends on the vegetation, so the stages are set for each fire division (section 1.2).

Note how different the rows are. Bush that burnt thirty-five years ago is old in Grassy / Heathy Dry Forest and barely middle-aged in Forby Forest, while Basalt Grassland is old just six years after a fire. Inland Plains Woodland rarely carries fire at all. Its stages describe what follows the unusual fire that does get through, and its 150-year maximum is only a best estimate. Some stands can be degraded by a single fire.

What you might see at each stage

Why a mix of growth stages is valuable

Different animals need different stages at the same time. Young regrowth is dense at ground level, good for small mammals and low-feeding birds. Mature bush has structural variety and accumulated logs. Old bush is where most hollows are. Old vegetation is now managed as an asset in its own right on public land, precisely because it is so hard to replace.³

The state’s benchmarks for public land give a sense of balance: roughly 5% juvenile, 10% adolescent, 30% mature and 20% old, with no more than 30% of fire-sensitive types below their minimum interval. These are landscape-wide targets, not property targets.³⁶

If you have recently experienced a fire, some of your block will have reset to the juvenile stage. But you may still have areas that escaped the fire, adding a diversity of growth stages to your block’s habitat.

Follow along · the example block near Pomonal

The 67 hectares of Grassy / Heathy Dry Forest that burnt in the 2025 Yarram Gap Road fire is juvenile, early in a stage that runs to three years. By its second spring, in late 2026, fire ephemerals should be carpeting the bare ground there and seedlings of the plants the fire killed should be showing. The 22 hectares that escaped last burnt in 2006, twenty years ago, so it is mature (10–35 years in its division), and the Damp Sands Herb-rich Woodland is early in Forby Forest’s long mature stage. The block now carries two stages side by side, and the older one is the scarcer: only 15% of the bush within 5 km is mature or older (Your block in the landscape, below).

Wildlife in the first few years

In the first six months you may see more wildlife than usual. That is exposure, not recovery — the survivors have nowhere to hide. Numbers usually fall from here as food and shelter run out and predators find them easy — predation pressure measurably rises once cover is gone. This is when pest control does the most good.¹⁰⁵³

Small mammals mostly come back from animals that survived the fire on the spot, in unburnt patches, logs, rock piles and burrows, rather than from animals moving in from outside.⁸ This is one reason why unburnt patches on your block are very important. Expect numbers to stay well down for the first few years and climb as the shrub layer thickens. Some mammals may start to return to pre-fire levels around ten years after fire, though drought after fire can continue to suppress numbers.⁹

After a high-severity fire, bird diversity can stay low for three years or more. Fire intensity will also affect how quickly your bird biodiversity returns. Data from the Grampians heathy woodlands showed that species returned sooner to areas that burnt patchily than to areas that burnt at high intensity.¹¹

Weeks

A month

Two months

Spring

Your block in the landscape

A block that escaped when most of the country around it burnt, and so holds older bush than its surroundings, is a refuge: it may be sheltering animals with nowhere else to go, and it holds the seed and shelter the burnt country will recover from. A block that burnt when the bush around it didn’t, so it is younger than its surroundings, may recover quicker than one surrounded by more burnt land, because plants and animals have unburnt country close by to come back from. And where nearly everything in the surrounding landscape burnt, renewal may proceed more slowly.

If everything around you burnt and a patch of yours didn’t, protecting those smaller unburnt areas from weed invasion and grazing pressure is likely the most valuable thing you can do.

The reverse also holds: if your block burnt but is surrounded by long-unburnt country, your young regrowth may be the scarce stage, and protecting the rare species within the burnt area that pop up after the fire from weeds and grazing may be the most valuable thing you can do.

Follow along · the example block near Pomonal

The 2025 fire burnt 79% of the native bush within 5 km, so most of the surrounding country is now juvenile (85%), and only 15% is mature or older. On the block it is 70% juvenile and 30% mature: proportionally twice as much older bush as the country around it.

The block’s 29 hectares of mature bush are not on their own, though. The tool finds they adjoin an 825-hectare patch of mature or older bush, so they are the edge of the largest refuge nearby rather than a lone island. For the burnt part of the block, that means shelter, seed and surviving animals are close by, and for the unburnt part, it means protecting it also protects the edge of something bigger.

Remember, there may be smaller unburnt patches inside a fire boundary that don’t show up in the state mapping.

In the first weeks the bush looks dead. Most of it isn’t. Nearly every plant on your block uses one of two strategies to return after fire: it resprouts, or it is killed and comes back from seed. These life strategies help us identify which plants are going to be just fine, and which ones are more sensitive to fire when it comes outside of tolerable fire intervals.

1. Resprouters — back in weeks

Growing points protected under thick bark or underground. Eucalypts shoot straight down the trunk and along the limbs; grasses and bracken come from underground; grass trees have been recorded shooting within a fortnight.⁷²

Look for: shoots emerging from bark, fresh growth at the base of a trunk, green spears in a burnt tussock. If you see this, the plant is fine.

On the example block: Brown Stringybark, Austral Grass-tree, Heath Tea-tree, Spiny-headed Mat-rush and Austral Bracken.

2. Obligate seeders — killed by fire, and start over from seed

Killed outright, returning only from seed in the soil or released from woody fruit by heat. Most local banksias, hakeas, wattles and peas.¹⁴³²

Look for: nothing at first, then a carpet of seedlings, usually late in the first year. The parent plants stay dead.

On the example block: Golden Wattle, Myrtle Wattle, Bushy Needlewood (Hakea decurrens), Desert Banksia and Grampians Thryptomene.

Seeders may also be fire-cued germinators — you likely have never seen these before!

Seed that sits in the soil for decades until smoke or heat breaks dormancy. It is why people find orchids, lilies and peas they are certain were never there — the orchid response after Black Saturday was documented in detail for exactly this reason.¹⁵ After the 2006 Mt Lubra fire, monitoring turned up entirely new populations of threatened plants in country unburnt for fifty or sixty years.³

Look for: anything unfamiliar, especially in the first spring. Much of it won’t be visible again for decades.

On the example block: Running Postman and Showy Parrot-pea, whose hard seed germinates after the heat of a fire; Austral Grass-tree, which flowers en masse after fire; and Pink Fingers and Wax-lip Orchid, which flower most strongly in the first spring after a fire.

Some seeders only occur during the juvenile stage

Some plants are built to exploit bare ground, full sun and no competition immediately after a fire. These are the fire ephemerals: fast, short-lived, and useful for holding soil and feeding insects and seed-eaters.² However, the same opening is what weeds are built for — see Part 4.

On the example block: Cotton Fireweed, Slender Fireweed, Australian Carrot, Small Poranthera and Spoon Cudweed, all of which can grow from seed to seed in under a year.

Why the seeders are the ones to monitor

A resprouter has to be killed outright to be lost, which takes an extraordinary fire. A seeder only has to be caught at the wrong moment.

First, seeders must germinate after the fire. They might come up in a mass germination event, but those numbers will dwindle. Monitoring of the Mt Cassell Grevillea counted 294 seedlings in 2024 and 214 a year later — 73% survival.³

Then they must grow old enough to flower for the first time. After the Mt Lubra fire, Grampians Rice-flower took two years to flower for the first time and Grampians Bitter-pea three.³

If that patch burns again before the seeders have rebuilt their seedbank, they could be gone from it. That is the minimum interval in 1.4, in practice. On the example block, the gap between the last two fires was 19 years. Grampians Rice-flower, which has records in the surrounding country, needed at least two years to reach first flower and several more to build a seedbank. It likely made it this time, but had the fire come ten years earlier, in 2015, the risk of losing it would have been much higher.

Your fire-sensitive plants in the lookup tool

There is a tab for each vegetation type on your block, plus an All together tab for the whole block; the vegetation you are looking at shows in yellow on the map. Each plant card shows a photo from iNaturalist (tap the name to open it there) and a row of icons:

• The fire that may have come too soon, or the year to keep fire out until — the card’s headline, explained below.
• Years to first seed — how many years a seedling takes to set its first seed.
• Where its seed is kept — in the soil, where older seed may survive a fire, or held on the plant in woody fruit, which burns with the plant.
• Threatened — shown for species listed as threatened in Victoria or nationally.

Species that are worth being your focus are pulled into two groups:

• Survey for these first — shown where part of your block burnt twice within the time these plants need to set seed, so they may have had no seed on board when the second fire came. Plants that hold their seed in woody fruit, like banksias and hakeas, are most at risk, because the second fire burns the seed before it drops.
• Should be fine if fire stays out until … — the other seeders, still growing back from the last fire. The year is when the slowest of them should be seeding, but only if the seedlings get the chance to grow: weeds that smother them, or rabbits, deer and other grazers that eat them, can wipe them out just as surely as a fire that comes too soon (Part 4).

Follow along · the example block near Pomonal

On the Heathy Woodland tab, the lookup tool works from 227 survey plots of Heathy Woodland in the Greater Grampians, surveyed between 1976 and 2021. Most of the plants commonly recorded there resprout, such as Heath Tea-tree, Flame Heath and Austral Grass-tree, which is why this country greens up quickly after a fire. The tool leaves those out and shows only the seeders still growing back.

Because 67 hectares burnt in 2006 and again in 2025, only 19 years apart, it puts nine seeders under Survey for these first, among them Silver Banksia, Showy Parrot-pea, Cat’s Claw Grevillea, Desert Banksia, two needlewood hakeas and Golden Wattle. They take five to twenty years to set their first seed, so some may have had none on board when the 2025 fire came. The banksias and hakeas hold their seed on the plant, which makes them the most exposed.

The other ten seeders sit under Should be fine if fire stays out until 2030, led by Common Fringe-myrtle and Pine Heath. They are growing back from the 2025 fire and should all be seeding by then, as long as weeds and grazing animals don’t get to the seedlings first.

The Shrubby Woodland and Damp Sands Herb-rich Woodland tabs are each built from far fewer plots (41), so read them more loosely. Shrubby Woodland shows the same two groups. The Damp Sands Herb-rich Woodland escaped the 2025 fire, so none of its seeders are flagged.

What we would watch here: the seeders on the ground that burnt twice. If the parrot-peas, banksias and wattles are thin there in the third year while the stringybarks and grass-trees look fine, the canopy has recovered and the shrub layer has not. That is the pattern to catch early (section 3.3), because it changes what the block can support for decades. The ground that escaped in 2025 is the comparison: it shows what the shrub layer should look like.

Parts 1 and 2 have given you a picture of your block: what sort of country it is, how often it has burnt and whether that suits it, where each part of it sits in the growth stages, and which are your most fire-sensitive plants. The lookup tool can put all of this on a few pages for you to keep.

Monitoring only works if you can compare. A wander with a camera tells you little; the same spot, photographed the same way, three years running, tells you a great deal. Set the fixed points up first — everything else in Part 3 hangs off them.

Monitoring plots

Pick two areas of about two hectares in the parts of the block you most want to know about, and mark the corners so you can find them again. Use the same two plots for the hollow transect⁵ (4.6), habitat structure (3.3) and bird surveys (3.5). Two plots lets you compare, which is what makes any of the numbers mean something.

Keep a simple record

Date, what you did, what you saw. A notebook is enough. What matters is that it is continuous — gaps are what make monitoring data hard to use later.

A species list for your block is the most valuable record you can hold, and the best time to make one is before a fire. Afterwards, it is the only way to answer the question that matters: not what came back, but what didn’t.

iNaturalist makes this possible without botany. You photograph things; the app’s AI suggests an identification and a community of identifiers confirms or corrects it. Records flow through to the Atlas of Living Australia, so the list becomes part of the public record rather than sitting on your phone.

Recording signs of regrowth, not just plants

After a fire, photograph the evidence as well as the species: epicormic shoots running down a burnt trunk, fresh growth at the base of a stump, green spears in a blackened tussock⁴, a carpet of seedlings. These tell you which strategy each plant is using (2.2), and therefore whether it is coming back at all.

Your list, and where to find it

Once you have been recording for a while, zoom to your property in iNaturalist and you have your own species list¹⁸¹⁹ — every observation anyone has made there, which you can print as a checklist to work from (2.2). For a head start before you have built one, the Atlas of Living Australia will list what has been recorded in the surrounding country (2.3).

Natives and weeds

The app flags introduced species.¹⁸ Anything it names as introduced goes on your weed list for Part 4 — and a plant appearing on your place for the first time after a fire is worth acting on early.

This survey measures the shape of the bush rather than its species — how much canopy, midstorey and ground cover there is, and how much of it is native. It is the quickest way to see which layer is lagging, and it needs no plant identification beyond native or not.

Run it in both monitoring plots (3.1) and compare. A canopy recovering while the midstorey stays open is the pattern to watch for — it usually means either obligate seeders lost (2.2) or browsing pressure (4.4).

Birds are the most practical thing to monitor on a recovering block, for four reasons.

• You can detect them. They are abundant, diverse and mostly identifiable by sound, which means you can survey them without catching or disturbing anything.
• They read the habitat for you. Different species need different layers — ground, midstorey, canopy, hollows. A bird list is effectively a readout of the structure in 3.3. Losing the midstorey birds tells you the midstorey hasn’t come back, whatever the canopy looks like.
• They recover on a known timetable. Diversity stays low for around three years after a severe fire (2.1), so a block that is still quiet in year two is normal — and one still quiet in year five is telling you something.
• People notice them. The first return of a familiar call is the most convincing evidence of recovery most landholders will ever get.

There are two ways to survey them, and they answer different questions: a standard survey done by ear (3.5), and a listening station that runs continuously (3.6).

The BirdLife Australia two-hectare, twenty-minute survey is the standard method in this country. Its value is comparability: your results sit alongside everyone else’s, in the same format, going back decades.

If you can’t identify birds by call, join a round rather than starting cold. Local Landcare groups and birding networks run surveys and are generally glad of company — it is the fastest way to learn, and you end up with the data either way.

A listening station is a small weatherproof-cased unit with microphones that records continuously and identifies calls automatically — three-second slices of song turned into a spectrogram, then matched by image recognition. Results appear on a phone app, usually within minutes.²¹⁷ It runs unattended for months, which is the whole point — see 3.7 for what it can and can’t tell you.

Recordings are kept, so an unusual identification can be listened to and checked, or uploaded to iNaturalist for someone else to confirm.

Three things are worth knowing before you buy one, and none of them are in the manual.

1. It hears its own patch, not your property

We tested this against an experienced observer surveying a plot while we checked what the nearest station logged in the same twenty minutes. Standing in the plot, the station picked up roughly one of the birds the observer recorded. Several hundred metres away it picked up essentially none of them, and logged a different set of birds instead.

So a station’s list belongs to the ground it stands on. One unit does not cover a property, and if there is unburnt bush within earshot, some of what it hears is coming from there.

2. It will be offline more than you expect

Across our nine stations the network ran less than half the time, and by late winter seven of the nine were down — flat batteries, dropped coverage, water where it shouldn’t be. Check yours weekly. And read a quiet month as a flat battery before you read it as quiet bush.

3. It will name the odd wrong bird

Identification is done by an AI model listening for call patterns. It is right most of the time. One of our stations, beside a farm dam a long way inland, confidently reported a seabird. Treat an unusual record as a question — the recording is saved, so you or a local birder can check it.

What it is good at, and what it can’t replace

A station listens every day, at dawn, dusk and two in the morning, for months. Over the year ours picked up 117 species across the nine properties; expert observers surveying the same properties seasonally recorded 59. Night-callers, cryptic species and the bird that turns up once in June are the station’s territory.

But some birds barely vocalise. Our observers recorded a goshawk, a kite, a falcon and a firetail that no station ever picked up, and one parrot recorded by observers at five properties was never detected acoustically. Do both if you can. If you can only do one, the station is the one you can afford to run forever.

Most of the native mammals on your block are out at night — gliders, possums, antechinus, bats. Walking around in daylight tells you almost nothing about them.

• They are the group fire hits hardest. Mammal numbers stay well down for years and some species take most of a decade to peak (2.1). They are also the group most exposed to foxes and cats once the cover is gone (4.1).
• They tell you whether hollows are the problem. If gliders and hollow-nesting birds are present but hollow-bearing trees are scarce, that is the case for nest boxes — and if they are absent, boxes will sit empty (4.6).
• The same survey counts the pests. Deer, foxes, rabbits and cats are nocturnal too. One night’s work tells you what you are protecting and what you are protecting it from.

Two tools cover it: cameras that watch continuously, and a thermal scope for walking the block yourself (3.9).

Trail cameras

A 4G camera with a solar panel runs around $450–750 and sends photos to your phone; a data-only SIM costs about $95 a year. Night vision reaches roughly 15 metres. Expect thousands of images — AI sorting software does the first pass and you check what it flags.

Thermal scopes and night walks

A thermal scope picks up body heat, so it finds animals a spotlight would miss. They are expensive, around $3,500–4,000, which makes them a good thing for a Landcare group to own rather than an individual.

If you do one thing for wildlife after a fire, control the weeds and pest animals. That is the consistent finding from research following Black Saturday and Black Summer: controlling introduced predators and herbivores is generally the most valuable intervention available, ahead of anything you can plant or build.

What happens to predators

Foxes and cats move into burnt country almost immediately — within hours of the fire passing. Research on fire-affected Victorian landscapes found that where understorey cover was lost, pest predator activity increased around five-fold, and fox predation on medium-sized native mammals doubled.

The reason is simple. The animals that survived the fire have nowhere left to hide, and they are concentrated in whatever cover remains. Long-term small mammal trapping in Victorian parks shows the same pattern from the other side: a sharp drop in native small mammals after fire, and a slow recovery.

What happens to herbivores

Deer, rabbits and house mice arrive fast and eat the recovery. House mice are typically the first mammal back, breeding up on seed and fresh germination, and can dominate for years before native species return.⁹ Deer and rabbits hit the regrowth at exactly the stage it can least afford it — a browsed-off seedling is the same outcome as no germination (2.2).

The order that follows from this runs through the rest of Part 4: work out what you have (4.2), map and prioritise it (4.3), and deal with the animals (4.4).

Fire clears the ground, opens the canopy and puts nutrients in the ash bed. That is a regeneration opportunity for natives and an equally good one for weeds — and weeds are usually faster.

What makes a weed win after fire

• Fire-cued germination — heat or smoke triggers it, so the fire itself starts the infestation.
• A persistent seedbank — seed that has been waiting, sometimes for years.
• Speed — establishing and setting seed before natives have closed the gap.

Where to look

Weeds arrive along edges and disturbance. Check, in roughly this order: access tracks and roadsides; watercourses and drainage lines, where rain carries seed downhill and eventually into waterways; animal pads and fence lines; and anywhere machinery worked during or after the fire, including containment lines and dozer tracks.

What this project found

Across the nine demonstration properties, the species that turned up were:

• Woody: sallow wattle, blackberry
• Grasses: perennial veldt grass
• Pioneers: stinkwort, horehound, thistles
• Bulbs, corms and tubers: cape tulip, South African weed orchid, arum lily, bridal creeper
• New arrivals: red ink weed, which appeared on one property only after the fires

That last line matters most. A plant showing up on your place for the first time after a fire is the highest-value target you will get¹³ — small, beatable, and about to stop being either (4.3).

If you are not sure what something is, photograph it and let iNaturalist name it (3.2).¹⁸

Weed control after a fire goes wrong in a predictable way: everything looks urgent, people start at the gate and work inwards, and a year later the roadside infestation is knocked back while the small new one up the back has become the big one.

The fix is to write down what you have and where, before you start spraying. A map lets you prioritise rather than react, tells you where to return to, and shows progress over years — which is most of what keeps anyone going.

Prioritising

1. New arrivals first. Small, beatable, and won’t be either in three years.
2. Small and isolated before big and established. An outlier you can eliminate outright beats a dent in a large infestation.
3. Protect the best country first. Work outward from your highest-value bush, not inward from the fence.
4. Work along the spread paths. Uphill and upstream of clean country. Treat the source before the sink.

Project Platypus has a weed prioritisation tool that works this through more formally, weighing how invasive a species is against how much you have and what it threatens.

Not bringing more in

After a fire there is more traffic on your place than ever — contractors, fencing crews, gravel, hay, machinery — and nearly all of it is a weed vector. Wash down vehicles, machinery, boots and tools on the way in and out, and use certified weed-free seed, mulch, soil and gravel.

Control: match the method to the plant

What works depends on how the plant stores its energy and moves its seed. Broadly:

• Woody legumes (sallow wattle, blackberry) — fire-triggered seedbanks mean mass germination. Plan for repeat visits across years, not one campaign.
• Perennial grasses (veldt grass) — hardest to see, hardest to kill, easiest to spread on machinery.
• Pioneers (stinkwort, horehound, thistles) — fast on bare ground, but the most tractable group if caught before seed set.
• Bulbs, corms and tubers (cape tulip, weed orchid, arum lily, bridal creeper) — the ones that defeat people, because the plant you can see is not where the energy is. The AABR guide to weeds with underground reproductive structures covers these in detail.

Cape tulip flower

Cape tulip corms

Weed orchid rosette

Weed orchid tubers

Fire changes the balance between native animals and pest species, and it changes it quickly. It also opens a short window where control is unusually effective.

Foxes and cats

They arrive within hours and hunt in the open. There is no realistic way for one landholder to hold a fox population down alone — foxes range widely and the gap fills. This is the clearest case for coordinated work: baiting and trapping programs run across whole landscapes, and joining one does more than anything on your own boundary.

Deer

Fallow and red deer are the main problem in this region. They damage regrowth at the stage it can least afford it, compete with native herbivores, spread weed seed and trample sensitive ground. Control is through ground and aerial shooting and trapping, and again works best coordinated — there is a regional deer program you can join rather than starting from scratch.

Rabbits

Rabbits are the one pest where fire genuinely helps you. Burnt ground makes warrens visible for the first time in years, and with little feed about, remaining rabbits take bait far more readily. If you are going to do rabbit work, the eighteen months after a fire is the moment.

Two cautions. Surviving native animals are also short of food and shelter, so plan control with that in mind. And machinery work around warrens can damage waterways and Aboriginal cultural heritage — check before you start.

Know your obligations

Baiting, shooting and earthworks all carry legal requirements, and some need permits. Agriculture Victoria, DEECA, your CMA, Aboriginal Victoria and your local council can tell you what applies. Ask before you start rather than after.

Use your monitoring

Trail cameras (3.9) tell you which pest species are actually present, where they move and when — which is the difference between control aimed at a problem and control aimed at a guess.

More than 300 Australian vertebrate species depend on tree hollows — around 114 birds, 83 mammals, 79 reptiles and 27 amphibians.²⁴ They use them for nesting, breeding, shelter, and escape from predators and weather.

Hollows cannot be hurried

Hollows form slowly, through fire scars, branch loss, fungal decay, insect activity and plain weathering. Typical formation times:

A hollow-bearing tree lost today cannot be replaced in a human lifetime. That single fact drives most of what follows.

What fire does

Fire both makes and destroys hollows. Scars begin the decay that eventually forms one, and historically patchy, low-severity fire was part of how hollows came about. But severe fire collapses hollow trunks, brings down limbs and kills ancient trees outright — and it does that far faster than new hollows appear.

After a severe fire, hollow availability often drops, at least for a while, and competition for what remains rises. But a burnt tree is not necessarily an empty one. Fire can open new hollows in scarred trunks and limbs, and trees killed by fire can go on forming hollows for decades as they decay. The trees on your place that carry hollows now, burnt or unburnt, are doing work for a wide area.

What to do

• Keep standing dead trees. Stags are often the best hollow trees on a property and are the first thing people tidy up. Where they can safely be kept, keep them (see 0.1 on hazard trees).
• Keep old paddock trees. A single large old tree in the open may hold more hollows than a hectare of regrowth.
• Leave fallen timber where it lies. Logs are ground-level habitat, and after fire there is very little other cover.
• Only then consider adding hollows — and work out first whether you need to (4.6).

Nest boxes are the most popular post-fire intervention going, and the easiest to get wrong. They are satisfying to build, easy to fund, and visible from the driveway. None of that makes them necessary on your particular block.

The question worth answering first is not what boxes should I put up but does this place actually need them. There are two ways to find out, and they work well together.

Route one: count your hollows

The direct approach is to find out how many hollow-bearing trees you have and where they are. Two people can survey a plot in an hour or two, and the method is simple enough to teach on the spot — several of our landholders learnt it by joining in.

The number itself is less important than the comparison and the habit. Walking a transect makes you look up, and most people find things on their own place they had walked past for years.

Route two: let the animals answer

There is a simpler test, and in some ways a better one. Put up a few boxes — not thirty, a handful, in two or three designs — and watch what happens.

If they get used, the demand is real and more are worth putting up. If they sit empty through a couple of seasons, there aren’t the animals looking yet, and your money and weekends are better spent on weeds, pest control or protecting the trees you still have.

This is a slower answer than a transect, but it is a truer one. A box is only habitat if something moves into it.

Why we’d do both

The two routes answer different questions. The occupancy trial tells you whether boxes are needed. The transect tells you where they should go, and gives you something to compare against in ten years.

More than that, the transect replaces guessing with a feel for your own block — which trees carry hollows, what size, and where the gaps are. That knowledge outlasts any box.

If 4.6 says your block needs more hollows, there are three ways to add them, and they suit different animals.

Nest boxes

The demonstration allocation used in this project was nine boxes per property across three designs — a squirrel glider box, a microbat box, and a small glider or antechinus box — built by the Stawell Men’s Shed. Eighty-one went up across the nine sites.

Three designs rather than one is deliberate. You rarely know what is looking for a hollow until something moves in, and occupancy across different designs is itself the answer (4.6).

For box designs, dimensions and entrance sizes by target species, see Project Platypus’s nest box resources, which gathers the DELWP, North East CMA, Land for Wildlife and BirdLife Australia guides in one place.

Carved hollows

A hollow can be cut directly into a living tree by a climbing arborist, producing something closer to the real thing than a box: better insulated, longer lasting, and part of the tree rather than bolted to it. It needs a specialist, so it suits a few high-value trees rather than a whole property. Log-box hollows — assembled from a hollowed section of log — are a middle option that a group can build in a workshop.

Habitat pods and ground habitat

Not everything nests in trees. Ground-dwelling mammals and reptiles lose their cover entirely in a severe fire, and ground-level structures help while the understorey rebuilds: habitat pods, tile grids, and basking tiles for reptiles. Trust for Nature supplied eight pods per site to the three Little Desert properties in this project.

The most common question after a fire, and the answer is nearly always not yet.

Planting into regenerating ground is one of the few genuinely counterproductive things you can do. The seedlings you can’t see yet are competing with what you put in, tubestock brings its own weed seed and genetics, and the money is gone at the point where weed and browsing control would buy you far more.

Good reasons to plant

• A species burnt out locally — most likely where two fires fell inside the minimum interval (section 1.4) and a seeder never returned.
• A structural layer still absent after two seasons, shrubs especially.
• Connectivity — linking two patches so animals can move between them.
• Erosion — actively moving soil. Urgent, and properly soil stabilisation rather than revegetation.

Reasons that aren’t

• It looks bare. It will, for a while.
• You want to be doing something. There is plenty to do — see below.
• There is funding for plants. Funding is not a diagnosis.

If you do plant

Match the vegetation type — your EVC benchmark (section 1.2) lists what belongs. Use local provenance stock, and weed-free mulch, soil and gravel (section 4.3). Plant into gaps rather than across regenerating ground, and guard against browsing, or you are running a feeding station for deer and rabbits.

Everything in this guide, in the order it is worth doing. The logic is simple: cheap and effective first, expensive and irreversible last, and nothing bought before the data says it is needed.

Why this order

Protection is free and irreplaceable. An unburnt patch, a hollow-bearing tree, a fallen log — none of these can be bought back once lost.

Invasives are the one thing that reliably changes the outcome. The research after Black Saturday and Black Summer is consistent on this (4.1): the rapid assessments following the 2019–20 megafires both concluded that controlling introduced predators and herbivores was the most valuable intervention for native species recovery.²⁵²⁶ The window is the first couple of years.

Monitoring comes before intervention, not after. Nest boxes, thinning and replanting are all decisions that need evidence. Without it you are guessing, and the guesses cost money.

Replanting is last because most of it is unnecessary. That is not a counsel of despair — it is the most useful thing in this guide. Money not spent on tubestock is money available for weed control, which will do more.

One page, filled in once and revisited each year. It turns the rest of the guide into a decision you have actually made.

Keep it with your photo point records. The value is in filling it in again in twelve months beside the first version — that comparison is the whole point of Part 3.

What to do when. Timings follow the seasons this project worked to; adjust for your own district and season.

Once only, at the start

Set up photo points and monitoring plots (3.1), and pull your fire history and vegetation type (1.2, 1.3). None of it takes long and everything else depends on it.

The most valuable record you can hold is a list of what grows on your place. Start it now, on iNaturalist, and build it across the seasons.

You don’t need to identify anything. That is the part that stops people before they begin. Walk your block, and whenever you see something in flower that you don’t recognise, photograph it — whole plant, leaves, and the flower — and post it. The app suggests a name and other people confirm or correct it. Your job is to capture an example, not to know what it is.

Walk it seasonally. Most plants are only identifiable while they are flowering, and they don’t all flower at once.¹⁸¹⁶ A walk each season for a couple of years turns up things a single spring walk never will. Section 3.2 has the detail on photographing plants so they can actually be identified.

What it gives you later

Zoom to your property on iNaturalist and you have every species anyone has recorded there. Print it off and it becomes a checklist: after a fire, walk the block and tick off what comes back.

What is still unticked after two or three seasons answers the question that matters — not what returned, but what didn’t. That is what decides whether replanting is warranted (4.9), and it is not a question you can answer from memory.

It works the other way too. Anything you find that is not on your list is new, and after a fire a new plant is either a fire-cued germinator that has been waiting in the soil for decades² (2.2) or a weed worth acting on early (4.2).

For a head start on what to look for, the Atlas of Living Australia will give you a checklist of everything recorded in the country around you — 2.3 shows what one looks like. It is a prompt rather than a record of your block.

Photo points are the cheapest monitoring there is, and the before photograph is the one you cannot go back and take.

Put them in your best country first. The richest understorey, the densest midstorey, the stand of old trees with hollows. These are the places you most want to be able to protect, and the places where knowing what was lost will matter most.

You can add more points after a fire, and you will — across badly burnt, lightly burnt and unburnt ground (3.1). But those tell you how the ground recovered. A point set up beforehand tells you what it recovered to, and whether it got back there.

Section 3.1 has the protocol: mark the standing position, frame on a fixed landmark, record the point name and date.⁵ Three to five points and an afternoon.

2000

2005

Later

Map the good patches while you are at it

Mark on an aerial photo where the best understorey is, where the midstorey is densest, where the old trees stand. You are recording two things: what to compare against afterwards, and what to defend first if you ever get the choice. The habitat structure survey (3.3) gives you a proper way to record those layers, and doing it once now is worth more than three times later.

Part 1 is a set of lookups that take an afternoon and do not require a fire to be useful.² Doing them in advance means that if one comes, you already know what you are dealing with.

• Your vegetation type (1.2) — the EVC and division your block sits in, and the benchmark list of what belongs there.
• Your fire history (1.3) — every fire on the record, and the gaps between them.
• Your tolerable fire intervals (1.4) — the minimum and maximum your vegetation can take.
• Your growth stage (1.5) — how long since the last fire, and what that means for what is there now.

Then sort your species list

Take the list from 6.1 and put every species into a fire-response group — resprouter, seeder, or fire-cued (2.2 has the method). The seeders are your watch list.⁴¹⁷

Now put that against your fire history. If the gap since your last fire is shorter than the minimum interval for your vegetation, the seeders on your list are the species at risk, and you know which ones to look for before anything happens rather than afterwards.

Very little of this is best done alone, and most of it is cheaper and easier with help.

• Your local Landcare group or network. The first call. They run surveys you can join, often hold shared equipment such as thermal scopes, and know your district’s weeds and who else is working on them.
• Your Catchment Management Authority. Can pull your property’s fire history and mapping (1.3), and administers much of the funding.
• DEECA for vegetation, fire ecology and threatened species questions; Agriculture Victoria for weed and pest declarations, control methods and legal obligations (4.4).
• Trust for Nature for conservation covenants and, in this project, habitat pods.
• Your local Men’s Shed for nest boxes. This worked well here and is worth asking about.
• Local ecologists and birders. An expert survey once or twice a year complements anything automated (3.7), and local birders will verify uncertain records.

Further reading

• Trust for Nature, Helping the bush recover from fire — vegetation divisions, fire intervals and recovery stages in more detail than Part 1 goes into, plus the case for covenanting.
• Cheal (2010), Growth stages and tolerable fire intervals for Victoria’s native vegetation data sets — the source of the interval and growth-stage tables in Part 1, including the key fire-response species behind them.
• VicFlora — the reference for identifying Victorian plants; its Interplay of Victoria’s flora with fire page sets out how species respond, by group.
• Post-fire Weeds Triage Manual (Arthur Rylah Institute) — the Victorian reference on deciding which weeds to tackle first after fire. The longer version of 4.3.
• Australian Association of Bush Regenerators — post-fire resources — technique guides by weed type, including weeds with underground bulbs, corms and tubers, and a video series on telling native seedlings from weed seedlings.
• Project Platypus nest box resources — designs, dimensions and installation guides. The detail behind 4.7.
• Wimmera weed and pest priorities — the regional priority lists behind 4.2.
• Pyrenees Firewise Garden Guide — the companion to this guide for the garden and defendable space around the house.
• Victorian Landcare Gateway — fire recovery — fencing, stock, pasture, soils and water: the agricultural side we don’t cover.

One printable sheet per protocol in this guide. Take them on the walk; transcribe or photograph them afterwards.