Hard to kill: here’s why eucalypts are survival experts

By Gregory Moore, Senior Research Associate, School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, The University of Melbourne

They can recover from fire. Grow back from a bare stump. Shrug aside bark loss that would kill a lesser tree. Endure drought and floods.

Eucalypts are not interested in dying. They’re survivors. The world’s 800-plus species are almost all found in Australia, a continent with old, degraded soils and frequent fires and droughts.

In the fossil record, they first appear about 34 million years ago. As the Australian continent dried out, eucalypts gradually emerged as the dominant…

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