Australian eucalypt forests are resilient to bushfires, with 70 percent of plants found to be able to make it through the infernos due to defence mechanisms developed over millions of years, a new study has found. Ecologist Patrick Norman and four other scientists based at Griffith University and Australian National University conducted a scientific research on forest fire recovery (pdf). A key finding was that even scorched plants could come back to life by storing energy in recovery buds, which eventually resprout new trees. “Some plants survive through the use of recovery buds which store energy reserves under their bark and in the ground and sprout new growth even when every leaf on the tree has been burned,” Norman told AAP. The study which comes after the devasting Black Summer 2019-2020 mega-bushfires found that most of the eucalypt forests are dominated by tree species that can recover quickly after bushfire, providing structural …