A new paper published in Nature shows how collections have been used to understand the impacts of recent wildfires on Australian vegetation.
The publication, Implications of the 2019-2020 megafires for the biogeography and conservation of Australian vegetation (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21266-5), reports on the biogeographic and taxonomic impact of Australia’s 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires.
The authors quantified the impact of the fires on native vascular plant taxa within the south-east Australian mainland using spatial occurrence data from more than 9000 species downloaded from the Australasian Virtual Herbarium. They report: Based on geocoded species occurrence data we estimate that [more than] 50% of known populations or ranges of 816 native vascular plant species were burnt during the fires, including more than 100 species with geographic ranges more than 500km across.