What If Gone

Species → Bare-nosed Wombat

Bare-nosed Wombat

Vombatus ursinus

1,345,000 individuals (mainland Tasmania + Flinders Island + Victoria, 2020)
Extinction risk Least Concern
Ecosystem engineerShelter providerClimate change
Bare-nosed Wombat (Vombatus ursinus)
Photo: Charles J. Sharp, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

What if it disappeared?

Impact Moderate
1 year

Without wombats to dig new ones, the burrow network stops expanding within the first year. Existing burrows don't vanish overnight: in the short term, the species sheltering in them would likely keep benefiting, with no immediately visible change on the landscape.

Hypothesis
10 years

Over ten years, the upkeep that keeps a burrow open and usable would go missing: part of the network would start collapsing or clogging up. That is exactly the kind of burrow that shelters the most species after a fire — sites studied after Australia's 2019-2020 gigafires held more native species around burrows than comparable sites without one.

Extrapolated
Detail

Extrapolation à partir de Linley, Geary, Jolly et al. (2024), qui mesurent la fonction de refuge des terriers de wombat après les mégafeux australiens de 2019-2020, sans documenter la vitesse à laquelle un terrier laissé à l'abandon perd cette fonction.

Linley et al. (2024), based on 28 burrows and 28 paired control sites monitored by camera traps over 16,645 trap-days after the 2019-2020 gigafires, measures the refuge function of burrows as they exist today — 56 species recorded in total, more around burrows than at control sites. It does not measure how quickly an unmaintained burrow loses that function; that step, plausible but unquantified, is what makes this point an extrapolation rather than a direct result.

What's missing to confirm it: No data on how quickly an abandoned wombat burrow collapses or loses its refuge function was found in the sources gathered here.

100 years

A century without wombats, and an entire refuge network would be missing right when Australia faces its most devastating fires. The small vertebrates that, as during the 2019-2020 gigafires, rely on burrows to survive a fire's passage would then have nowhere left to shelter at that scale.

Hypothesis
1000 years

Over a thousand years, other small burrowing animals would likely fill part of the gap left by the wombat — but without ever recreating networks as vast, deep, and durable. After every future gigafire, Australian wildlife would face the flames with a permanently thinner safety net.

Hypothesis

Documentation

Last verified: August 16, 2026