Managing the Landscape
The Prescribed Burning Atlas is a very significant accomplishment which will make a real contribution to the work of agencies and to the future safety of the community and its assets. It’s a really great example of researchers responding to the needs of end-user fire management agencies to address a difficult problem.
NAOMI STEPHENS, PROGRAM DIRECTOR, FUTURE NPWS AT NATIONAL PARKS AND WILDLIFE SERVICE, BUSHFIRE AND NATURAL HAZARDS CRC DIRECTOR

Prescribed Burning Atlas launch - webinar

Naomi Stephens (NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service), Prof Ross Bradstock (University of Wollongong) and Dr Hamish Clarke launch the Prescribed Burning Atlas, a website specifically designed for fire and land managers that compares the risk reduction benefits and costs from different combinations of prescribed burning strategies.

Landscape management uses prescribed burning and a range of other measures to mitigate the fire risk across different regions, not just in Australia but increasingly in fire-prone countries around the world. The Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC’s research has built a firm quantitative basis for understanding and comparing the effectiveness of these measures.

Research shows that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to prescribed burning. This finding has major implications for fire managers who need to embrace tailored prescribed burning solutions, based on the unique risk mitigation profiles for their regions, including local fire regimes, climate zones, human settlements and land-use patterns.

Prescribed burning remains a critical component of contemporary fire management in Australia and elsewhere. Based on the research in this Managing the Landscape theme, we now have a quantitative basis for understanding and comparing the effectiveness of prescribed burning for mitigating risk across different landscapes.

Key project outputs have included tools now used by fire managers in the forest and grasslands of southern Australia as well as the tropical savanna landscapes across northern Australia.

Online tools

These online tools were developed with CRC research and are designed to be ready for use. The tools here have been curated for this Driving Change theme. See more tools in the other themes.

PRESCRIBED BURNING ATLAS

The Prescribed Burning Atlas is a website designed specifically to assist and inform prescribed burning strategies so that land and fire managers can tailor their burning strategies to outcomes that will best reduce the risk in a target area within available budgets.

Developed through the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC in partnership with the University of Wollongong, University of Melbourne and Western Sydney University, the Prescribed Burning Atlas incorporates thousands of fire simulations to compare the level of risk reduction achieved from different combinations of prescribed burning techniques. The Atlas also compares the costs of different mitigation options and their effect on reducing the likelihood of life loss, property loss and landscape damage, as well as the effects of climate change on prescribed burning effectiveness.

It covers 13 different landscape types across New South Wales, ACT, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and Queensland, comprising different types of landscapes such as temperate forests, grasslands, savannas, deserts, woodlands and scrub.

Use Atlas

SAVANNA MONITORING AND EVALUATION REPORTING FRAMEWORK

This online tool evaluates the effects of fire where burnt area mapping is available across the Northern Territory, large parts of Western Australia, and Northern Queensland. It assesses nearly twenty years of data to show where bushfires have burnt, at what time of year (early or late dry season) and when an area was last burnt.

Use tool

Case studies

CRC research is driving change across communities, government and emergency service agencies, as highlighted by the case studies relevant to each Driving Change theme.

FINDING FIRES FASTER
The development of new and innovative algorithms are supporting near-continuous active fire surveillance from space unlike any other satellite hotspot products previously available.
CARBON ABATEMENT THROUGH BETTER FIRE MAPPING
Sophisticated fire mapping and modelling of fire severity is helping fire and land managers assess greenhouse gas emissions and develop carbon abatement plans.
PHOENIX RAPIDFIRE
The PHOENIX RapidFire fire simulator places Australia as a world-leader in wildfire tools and analysis.

Highlights

This collection is a curation of the best and most recent news articles, Hazard Notes, videos, posters, guides, journal articles and reports relevant to this theme.

Publications