Understanding Bushfire Behaviour

This work will establish a nationally aggregated and harmonised data asset on past fires burnt extent boundaries for Australia. Through collaboration between national, state and territory agencies, standardised state and national products would be produced. This work will support the agencies for the supply of datasets on geospatial boundaries of past fires, to fill a long-standing gap and demand for national fire history datasets. With improved satellite imagery data supply and cloud computing processing power, a satellite derived historical fire history for the nation would be created as well. This work will support bushfire research as well as National Emergency Management, National Fire Danger Ratings System and associated risk management operations.

Download the data and view it on the Digital Atlas of Australia.

Fuel data describes the combustible materials in a defined space and its related attributes such as type, amount, structure and moisture. Accurate estimation of fuel, alongside information about the type of vegetation at a location is key to managing and mitigating bushfire risk. Multiple organisations across different jurisdictions collect and use fuel data. However, there is no coordinated approach and community standards to harmonise, aggregate and share fuel data parameters across different stakeholders. This work will define implementation processes and systems for ongoing sharing of fuel data and related attributes for meeting the needs of multiple stakeholders and to better enable Australia-wide bushfire response and preparedness.

The efficient national monitoring of fuel conditions is very important to understand bushfire behaviour and risk, as highlighted by the Bushfire Earth Observation Taskforce, the NSW Bushfire Inquiry and the National Royal Commission for Natural Disaster Arrangements. This work will contribute towards compiling and sharing existing field and remote sensing observations of fuel attributes such as fuel load, structure and moisture in a national database. This national database will be used to improve remote sensing products and will be publicly available to support other research programs. The national fuel attributes databases will have direct benefits to bushfire planning and response given the fuel data will also be readily available for assessing bushfire risk, predicting fire behaviour, informing suppression efforts and planning prescribed burns.

Read the paper: Abdollahi A, Yebra M, Forest fuel type classification: Review of remote sensing techniques, constraints and future trends, doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2023.118315

The fire behaviour modelling platform will be a bridge from data acquisition, processing and modelling to operation and assessing bushfire risk. The platform will be developed as a proving and testing ground for new data, models and analytics. It will be a collaborative, open environment for researchers, agencies and stakeholders, and it will be open for use by stakeholders for research as well as operational evaluation. The aim is to create a model where there is a clearly articulated process for translating bushfire research into operational use from a predictive modelling perspective.

Access Spark: research.csiro.au/spark

The objective of the project is to deliver a robust and enduring framework to facilitate the development of new understanding of bushfire behaviour through simple access to core data sets. This work will look at technological and trust barriers, and barriers associated with sharing data and tools. AFAC proposes to use its extensive collaboration network to create an enduring capability.

The project will assemble and manage an accessible national bushfire research data collection. During this project, NHRA will develop a conceptual framework for bushfire research data management, to guide the collection, curation, and management of datasets, and to put in place necessary requirements for access to, and use of, the bushfire research data. A web-based bushfire data catalogue from NHRA projects and some Bushfire & Natural Hazards CRC (BNHCRC) projects will be established.

This project will deliver key elements towards a bushfire fuel data commons, supporting the use of the national fuel data in national bushfire simulation and other fire prediction systems. This includes fuel classification, algorithms used to calculate fuel attributes and frequently updated observed fuel attributes such as load, structure and dryness.