Long description

This bar chart is labelled ‘Total yearly burned area (hectares, thousands)’ on the vertical axis. This vertical axis starts at 0 and goes up to 300, in 50 thousand hectare intervals. The horizontal axis is labelled ‘Year’ and goes from 1955 to 2009. In 1955 there were approximately 10 thousand hectares burned by wildfires, but this began to rise significantly from the mid-1970s onwards. Although the number of thousand hectares per year fluctuated significantly throughout this time, there were significant ‘blips’ or higher readings in some years than others. For example: 1977, 55 thousand hectares; 1981, 70 thousand hectares; 1985, 105 thousand hectares; 1988, 110 thousand hectares; 1998, 95 thousand hectares; 2000, 170 thousand hectares; 2007, 260 thousand hectares. Apart from these years with ‘blips’ or higher readings, all years stayed below 50 and fell back to low levels seen only up to 1976 in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005.