Despite years of rain, Blue Mountains forests still haven’t recovered from the Black Summer megafires

Brook Mitchell/Getty For three years before the Black Summer megafires of 2019–20, cool season rainfall in southeastern Australia was only half that of normal.

When fires broke out, intensely dry conditions helped them spread through areas typically resistant to burning, such as wetlands and rainforests .

After the fires came three years of above-average rainfall, and scientific reports charted rapid vegetation regrowth.

It’s easy to think the rains let nature repair itself.

But is that the full story? In our new research , we looked at what happened to seven severely burnt plant communities in the Greater Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.

We found a mixed picture.

Wet sclerophyll forests supporting tall eucalypts skirted by ferns recovered within five years.

But Blue Mountains rainforests did not recover from burns of any severity.

Nor did grassy woodlands.

How can we track recovery? To find out how well forests and other communities recovered from the Black Summer fires, we tracked recovery across the million-hectare Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area .

Seven severe fires hit this region over the 2019–20 summer.

The biggest was the Gospers Mountain fire, which burned an area seven times the size of Singapore – the largest fire from a single ignition point in Australia’s recorded history.

Five years on, if you had looked out across the Blue Mountains landscape you might have thought recovery was well under way.

Thick scrub quickly replaced charred undergrowth in many areas.