‘Rare and threatened': the bid to save Grampian flowers after fire disasters

The Guardian

26-01-2025

The Grampians globe-pea, a critically endangered wiry shrub, had finished flowering and was fruiting when fires tore through its home in the Grampians national park, in western Victoria. The spiny plant with vibrant orange and yellow flowers is extremely rare and restricted to a handful of sites, including areas within the 76,000 hectares that burned over December and January.
Finding the globe-pea will be a priority when a plant rescue mission led by Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria heads to the Grampians to search for survivors and signs of life amid the charred landscape.
'We do not yet know the extent of the damage,' says the RBGV director and chief executive, Chris Russell, adding that the work of creating backup populations of species before they are 'lost forever' is urgent and ongoing, as climate change causes 'disruption to the whole system'.
Along with the state's environment department and local community groups, the RBGV is increasing its conservation efforts in the Grampians, known as Gariwerd to Indigenous peoples, after recent bushfires.
When conditions improve, a team of botanists and horticulturalists will assess the damage and collect seeds and cuttings from threatened species to store in the Victorian Conservation Seedbank, a repository of seeds and spores from native plants, and the RBGV's living collections.
The national park is a biodiversity hotspot, with its ancient sandstone cliffs, craggy slopes and surrounding plains, heathy woodlands and forests providing habitat for roughly a third of the state's flora, including 49 unique plant species not found anywhere else in the world, according to Parks Victoria.
'It's such a diverse geological and environmental space,' Russell says. 'There's a really high proportion of plants that only exist there, that are endemic to the Grampians. A whole range of those are rare and threatened.'
What happens next is critical.
Even fire-adapted species could be lost if they 'get smashed again' by fires next year, or a couple of years later, he says, without enough time to regrow, set seed, reproduce and come to maturity.
Dr Ella Plumanns Pouton, who researches the influence of fire on biodiversity, including in the Grampians, says fire can be a driver and a threat to plant diversity.
At a community level, fire shapes vegetation structure, she says, allowing light to come in, and creates niches and opportunities for new species to germinate.
Plumanns Pouton, who is not involved in the RBGV work, says many plants in the Grampians region have evolved strategies for dealing with fire. After a burn, some resprout from their trunk or from woody lignotubers lying underground, while others have dormant seeds that open and germinate under heat or smoke.
But for many species, the type and frequency of fire is a 'Goldilocks' scenario, she says.
A string of major blazes – in 2006, 2013, 2014 and 2024 – have burned 90% of the Grampians landscape, Plumanns Pouton says. 'The issue with having so many fires in such a short time frame is that plants need enough time to be able to accumulate seed again.'
More intense, frequent fires along with other threats like habitat loss, herbivores and disease, will require new solutions, she says, including creative ways to protect plant populations and reduce fire risk, as well as establishing insurance populations.
Prof Angela Moles, a plant ecologist who leads the Big Ecology Lab at the University of New South Wales, says plants and their environments were undergoing rapid and often unpredictable changes in response to climate change.
'The federal government in Australia has committed to no new extinctions,' she says. 'But we have hundreds, maybe thousands of different plant species that exist in just a few square kilometres, and if two fires come through too quickly, they're done.'
'We just don't know how it's going to play out. So putting some seeds literally in the seedbank is a really important thing.'
Forest and fire scientist Dr Tom Fairman from the University of Melbourne says climate change is prompting more difficult conversations about the best ways to conserve and protect biodiversity, and seedbanks were no longer a futuristic idea but a business-as-usual proposition.
Even relatively common, fire-adapted species can struggle to survive when intervals between fires are too short. 'They're not going to be able to handle absolutely everything you throw at them,' Fairman says.
According to RBGV, the greatest increase in banked threatened species in a decade came in the wake of the 2019-20 black summer fires. After those megafires, RBGV staff – supported by government funding – collected 105 threatened species from the fire scar: 72 in the form of seeds, with the remainder as cuttings for orcharding in living collections.
Russell says the team will be working against time in the fire-damaged landscape of the Grampians to find and carefully collect plant material and then swiftly deliver it to RBGV labs, seedbank and nurseries.
'We're talking about plants where there's just so little genetic material left on the planet that it's an absolute treasure – what you're handling is gold,' he says.
The Grampians globe-pea is one of five priority species, along with the Mt Cassell grevillea, a small low-lying shrub with holly-like leaves and striking red flowers considered critically endangered in Victoria, the vulnerable Grampians rice-flower and yellow-flowering Grampians bitter-pea.
The endangered Pomonal leek orchid, is also a priority, given the recent fires destroyed one of only two known sites for the endangered species.
Russell says it can be physically demanding and sometimes hazardous work, requiring a huge investment of time and expertise.
'The team love doing it because they're all so passionate and driven by their love of plants and wanting to play an active role in reducing the number of these beautiful, endemic plants from going extinct.'