Tom Vigilante

Wunambal Gaambera Aboriginal Corporation · Uunguu Healthy Country Team

Earth’s tropical savannas typically support high biomass of diverse grazing herbivores that depend on a highly fluctuating resource: high-quality forage. An annual wet–dry cycle, fire and herbivory combine to influence forage quality and availability throughout the year. In the savannas of northern Australia, a depauperate suite of large native (ma...

Savannas are the most fire-prone of Earth's biomes and currently account for most global burned area and associated carbon emissions. In Australia, over recent decades substantial development of savanna burning emissions accounting methods has been undertaken to incentivise more conservative savanna fire management and reduce the extent and severit...

Despite substantial investment in prescribed burning for biodiversity conservation there has been surprisingly little demonstration of its efficacy in achieving intended conservation aims for fauna. In the case of northern Australia’s threatened mammal fauna, most studies have reported negative responses to fire. We used satellite-derived fire scar...

Australian mammals have exhibited exceptionally high rates of decline since European settlement 230 years ago with much focus on small mammals in northern tropical savannas. In these systems, little scientific attention has been given to the suite of grazing macropods, family Macropodidae, (common wallaroo (Osphranter robustus), antilopine wallaroo...

ContextPopulations of native mammals are declining at an alarming rate in many parts of tropical northern Australia. Fire regimes are considered a contributing factor, but this hypothesis is difficult to test because of the ubiquity of fire. AimsThis preliminary study investigated relative abundance and richness of small mammals on a gradient of fi...

Australian savannas lack native megaherbivores (>500 kg body mass), but since the commencement of European colonisation in the 19th century bovine livestock, such as cattle (Bos sp.) and water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis), have established large feral populations that continue to geographically expand. The largest extant native herbivores are marsupia...

Indigenous groups are increasingly combining traditional ecological knowledge and Western scientific approaches to inform the management of their lands. We report the outcomes of a collaborative research project focused on key ecological questions associated with monsoon vine thickets in Wunambal Gaambera country (Kimberley region, Western Australi...

Aims To detect changes in area and vegetation dynamics of monsoon rain forests in relation to disturbance and an observed wetting trend. Location The Mitchell Plateau and the Bougainville Peninsula (north Kimberley, Australia). Methods Geo‐rectified aerial photographs acquired in 1949 and 1969 and a pre‐existing map from 2005 were used to detect...

The importance of Indigenous peoples’ and their ancestral estates for the maintenance and protection of biodiversity, ecosystem function, threatened species and cultural diversity is clear. Due to their nature, processes and tools to measure the impact of intercultural Indigenous land and sea management partnerships need to be innovative and adapta...

The small rainforest fragments found in savanna landscapes are powerful, yet often overlooked, model systems to understand the controls of these contrasting ecosystems. We analyzed the relative effect of climatic variables on rainforest density at a subcontinental level, and employed high-resolution, regional-level analyses to assess the importance...

In tropical areas where climatic conditions support both rainforests and savannas, fire is considered one of the main factors determining their distribution, particularly in environments where growth rates are limited by water availability. The observed expansion of some rainforests into savannas suggests that rainforest saplings could have traits...

The Wunambal Gaambera Aboriginal Corporation, its Uunguu Rangers, NAILSMA and CSIRO are working together to develop a new method for monitoring marine turtles (Mangguru) and dugongs (Balguja). The collaborative research supports the Wunambal Gaambera Healthy Country Plan, which sets out the aspirations of Traditional Owners to manage and maintain t...

Although boat-based surveys are not currently used to monitor the distribution and abundance of marine turtles over extensive areas in Australia, there are significant advantages in doing so at local and regional scales. For example, local feeding populations in Wunambal Gaambera country comprise primarily green turtles and, in contrast, most local...

Indigenous communities have increasingly been expressing their aspirations for the management of their marine and coastal environments through a process known as sea country planning. The Wunambal Gaambera Aboriginal Corporation, representing the Traditional Owner community associated with the Uunguu Native Title Determination, has chosen to create...

Summary Much of northern Australia’s tropical savannas are subject to annual intense and extensive late dry season wildfires, much of this occurring on Aboriginal land. Based on the successful West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement (WALFA) model, which has resulted in significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions, fire abatement programmes are planned fo...

Aboriginal people share a consistent landscape-burning practice across the vast Northern Australian savanna region. The practice is spatially and seasonally diverse and has been widely applied to manage important animal and plant resources and to bring about health y and amenable landscape states. The burning practices of Aboriginal people and thei...

Aim This study of contemporary landscape burning patterns in the North Kimberley aims to determine the relative influences of environmental factors and compare the management regimes occurring on Aboriginal lands, pastoral leases, national park and crown land. Location The study area is defined at the largest scale by Landsat Scene 108–70 that cove...

This study used a number of landscape-scale natural experiments to investigate the influence of individual fire events on the reproductive output of key fruit-bearing woody species [Buchanania obovata Engl. (two leaf forms), Persoonia falcata R.Br., Planchonia careya (F.Muell.) Knuth, Syzygium eucalyptoides (F.Muell.) B.Hyland, Syzygium suborbicula...

Indigenous landscape burning is practiced around remote communities in the Kimberleys but has been replaced by wildfires across uninhabited areas. A landscape-scale natural experiment was established to investigate the effects of these different fire histories (derived from a 10-year Landsat remote-sensing sequence) on the floristic structure and c...

The paper reports on the development of a decadal fire history, 1990–1999, derived from Landsat imagery, and associated assessment of landscape-scale patterns, in a remote, sparsely human-populated region of the high rainfall zone of monsoonal north-western Australia. The assembled fire history confirms observations, derived from coarser-scale imag...

The accounts of explorers and colonists in the Kimberley region of Western Australia were searched to find records of landscape burning by Aborigines. Analyses of these records provide estimates of the spatial and temporal patterns of fire across the region in historic times. The seasonality of fire varied across the region. In northern parts of th...