Ross Bradstock is Principal Research Scientist in the Biodiversity Research Group of the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service. He has studied the fire ecology of plant populations for nearly two decades and is currently engaged in studies of the nature and management of fire regimes in conservation reserves, including the application of policy and adaptive systems of fire management for biodiversity conservation. He has edited two books dealing with landscape and biodiversity conservation. Jann Williams is Senior Fellow in the Department of Geospatial Science at RMIT University. Her career to date has provided experience in both research and policy related to natural resource management. Her scientific interests include fire ecology and management, climate change impacts and environmental weeds, with a focus on tree-dominated systems. She is co-editor of Eucalypt Ecology (1997) and is currently President of the Ecological Society of Australia. Malcolm Gill has recently retired from the position of Senior Principal Research Scientist at the Centre for Plant Biodiversity Research, CSIRO Plant Industry. His research career has spanned many aspects of fire ecology, fire behaviour and fire management in a range of Australian ecosystems. He was the lead editor of the first anthology on Australian fire ecology, Fire and the Australian Biota (1981) and author of a variety of seminal papers on fire ecology which cemented the concept of the fire regime as a central tenet of the discipline.