Impacts of the unprecedented 2019-2020 bushfires on Australian animals

In total, we estimate that the area burnt in the 2019-20 fires considered here would have contained almost 3 billion native vertebrates.

Over 2019–20, Australia experienced its worst fire season on record in eastern, south-eastern, and parts of south-western Australia.
More than 15,000 fires occurred across all states, resulting in a combined impact area of up to 19 million hectares (Filkov et al. 2020). Particularly devastating impacts to biodiversity and human life occurred in eastern Australia, with around 12.6 million hectares containing primarily forest and woodland burning (Wintle et al. in press), although these area estimates are contested (Bowman et al. 2020). WWF commissioned us to estimate the number of individual native vertebrates that would have been present within the bushfire impact area and were thus killed or affected as a result of these fires.