Talk title: Managing wet Eucalypt forest fire risk through ecological thinning: opportunities & contsraints

A gravely serious dimension of anthropogenic climate change is the escalating global wildfire crisis. Reduction of fire hazards in flammable vegetation types such as eucalypt forests is an urgent priority. Prescribed burning is a well-established method to reduce fuel loads in dry eucalypt forests and hence the energy available for landscape fires. This approach is becoming more difficult to apply at scale in dry forests because of adverse side-effects including smoke pollution, biodiversity harms, and shrinking windows of opportunity to burn safely due to the increased frequency of droughts and dangerous fire weather. Wet eucalypt forests, however, cannot be practically managed with prescribed burning, hence there is growing interest in the mechanical removal of forest understorey and thinning of overstorey trees.  Forest thinning combined with prescribed burning is widely used in the western north America, by contrast the approach remains embryonic in Australia. I review the Australian experience with mechanical fuel treatments, highlighting the differences between commercial forest thinning and ecological thinning. I discuss opportunities and barriers for managing wet eucalypt forest fire risk with mechanical thinning.