Australians shocked as browning ‘horror’ spreads across hills in three states

A “great browning” is spreading across Australia, with forests covering tens of thousands of hectares of land losing their vibrant green colour, starved of moisture by unseasonably dry weather.

Photos showing dried-out eucalyptus trees along Australia’s south-west coast were the first sign of a problem. It has now been revealed that the problem has spread beyond the Great Australian Bite.

Some areas of Tasmania are now a “major concern” for Dr Joe Fontaine, a forestry expert at Murdoch University.

“It’s been a dry fall and temperatures have been higher than normal. And these rainforests that people thought were invulnerable are starting to turn brown,” he told Yahoo News.

Forests in another Australian state hit by ‘great browning’

Huon Valley residents are also concerned. One of them is forest regeneration specialist Sean Tooker, who has been documenting the rapid change since he first noticed it two months ago.

“I was driving home from work and the sunlight hit the western slopes of the ridge that runs along the valley, and I saw all these big areas of forest that had dried out in places,” he told Yahoo.

“I was shocked. I wondered why I hadn’t seen it before.”

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After noticing the “browning,” Tooker trekked through the forests south of Hobart to document what he saw.

“I saw more, even in the shaded ravines facing south, where there used to be rainforest, the trees were dead. And there were trees of all ages, whether they were young or mature,” he said.

“Then, east of Huonville, coming down the Channel Highway, I saw that everything was dying, not just the eucalypts. The shrub layer and even the grasses too.

“The strangest thing was that all the trees were intact and had not lost any leaves. But they seemed completely dead.”

But it was only when he headed east to the Tasman Peninsula that he became aware of the “horror” of the problem. There, extremely old trees were bleeding profusely through long vertical cracks, succumbing to a disease called ginger syndrome, a disease that affects eucalyptus trees, often following episodes of extreme heat.

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Massive ‘die-off’ under investigation

The Tasmanian Department of Natural Resources and Environment (NRE Tas) told Yahoo it was aware of reports of tree dieback in Tasmania, including in the Huon Valley. “It appears the recent reports of dieback are a result of dry weather conditions,” it said.

“The NRE Tas has been working in liaison with other land managers and organisations on possible actions and options to better understand the extent of the dieback.”

Separately, there have been reports from the Barossa Valley in South Australia that trees in that area are also showing signs of ginger syndrome.

Why is the “great browning” of trees comparable to the “mass bleaching” of corals?

Since Yahoo first reported the problem in Western Australia, the situation has worsened.

“After we spoke in April, the region had the hottest May on record, so mortality continued apace through the end of the month, until we finally got some decent rain,” Fontaine told Yahoo.

It’s too early to say how many trees have died. Fontaine doesn’t think we’ll see if they’re growing back until October.

The Bureau of Meteorology’s long-range forecast for July to September predicts above-average rainfall for central and eastern Australia. Rainfall is expected to be within the usual seasonal range for most of northern Australia, Western Australia and Victoria.

But climate change is bringing more frequent extreme weather events, including prolonged heat and drought, which has Fontaine concerned that some forests are failing to adapt. He sees the problem being replicated on the other side of the country, in Queensland, where corals are being hit by an increasing number of mass bleaching events.

“You just have to look at the Great Barrier Reef, it’s exactly the same story. We thought it only happened once, in 1998,” he said.

“And this has happened six times in the last two decades. So I think it’s going to happen again, unfortunately.”

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