Student researcher

Amanda Chong Research Leader

This Masters Research Project is beign undertaken by Ms Amanda Chong

Authoritative building footprint data is expensive to collect and often out-of-date, with capital city councils the primary users in Australia. Considering the lack of current authoritative data nationwide, crowd-sourced Voluntary Geographic Information (VGI) is an alternative approach to acquire geographic data. VGI is computationally easy and inexpensive with the ability for contributors to provide invaluable local knowledge of a given area.

The proposal for Amanda’s thesis is to crowd source building locations for use in risk assessments into software such as PHOENIX Rapidfire. Currently PHOENIX Rapidfire relies on letterbox location for any given land parcel. Amanda will compare the differences between the current method and the crowd-sourced building footprint centroids in residual risk calculations. The comparisons will be made across four case studies with contrasting land parcel sizes in the East Central catchment area. The results will inform whether crowd-sourced data provides a valuable dataset that can be used to enhance PHOENIX Rapidfire impact simulations of properties in bushfire-prone areas.