New online - November 2020

The latest CRC research, which includes new annual project reports and journal articles, is now available on the website. Read the details below in November’s summary.

CRC final reports

With The Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index: a system for assessing the resilience of Australian communities to natural hazards project now complete, the final report detailing the major outcomes and research findings is now available. This project developed the Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index to assess, for the first time, the capacity for disaster resilience in communities across Australia. The assessment of disaster resilience using the Australian Natural Disaster Resilience Index shows that communities in Australia do not all have the same capacity for disaster resilience. About 52% of the population live in areas with moderate capacity for disaster resilience, about 32% in areas with high capacity for disaster resilience and about 16% in areas with low capacity for disaster resilience. The research team comprised of Dr Mel Parsons, Dr Ian Reeve, Dr James McGregor, A/Prof Graham Marshall, Dr Richard Stayner, Dr Judith McNeill and Dr Sonya Glavac from the University of New England, and Dr Peter Hastings from the Queensland University of Technology.

CRC reports

The 2019/20 annual reports for the two research streams of the Fire surveillance and hazard mapping project has been published on the CRC website this month. Dr Bryan Hally, Dr Karin Reinke, Luke Wallace and Prof Simon Jones from RMIT University have written the Quantifying fuel hazard assessments - Fuels3D annual report 2019-2020 summarises the highlights of the year for the Fuels3D project, including the delivery and completion of end-user trials using the Fuels3D iPhone app, the assessment of a new sampling transect method to increase rate of in-field image capture of surface and near-surface fuels, and the conduction of a Fuels3D requirements workshop conducted with end-users. Fuels 3D is a beta smartphone application developed by the research team to allow land managers to rapidly collect imagery in the field and uses computer vision and photogrammetric techniques to calculate measures of fuel and severity metrics.

Active fire detection using the Himawari-8 satellite - annual report 2019-2020 by Prof Simon Jones, Dr Karin Reinke and Dr Chermelle Engel from RMIT University describes the background, research approaches, key milestones, utilisation study and outputs of the research team’s Himawari-8 active fire detection research over the past year. The Fire surveillance and hazard mapping project will continue to assist the Australian government in developing and validating the capability of the Himawari-8 data source and will assist in the ongoing improvement of vital bushfire information acquired through state-of-the-art remote sensing technology as needed by fire and emergency management now, and into the future.

Dr Alexander Filkov, Dr Thomas Duff and A/Prof Trent Penman from the University of Melbourne have completed the 2019/20 annual report for the Threshold conditions for extreme fire behaviour project. The report describes the phase of the project focused on the development of a new method to test flammability of live vegetation in dynamic conditions and understanding influence of climatic changes on the 2019/20 bushfire season in New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia.

The Improved decision support for natural hazard risk reduction project team, Prof Holger Maier (University of Adelaide), Dr Graeme Riddell (University of Adelaide), A/Prof Hedwig van Delden (Research Institute for Knowledge Systems),  Dr Sofanit Araya (University of Adelaide), Aaron Zecchin (University of Adelaide), Roel Vanhout (Research Institute for Knowledge Systems),  Graeme Dandy (University of Adelaide) and Eike Hamers (University of Adelaide), has produced its annual project report for 2019/20. The report summarises some of the enhanced software capabilities of the Unified Natural Hazards Risk Mitigation Exploratory Decision support system (UNHaRMED) and describes several utilisation activities designed to highlight the benefits of using an interactive risk assessment tool in participatory settings.

The 2019/20 annual report for the Coupled fire-atmosphere modelling project was written by the Bureau of Meteorology’s Dr Mika Peace, Dr Jeff Kepert, Harvey Ye and Jesse Greenslade. The report summarises the project deliverables over the past year which include the preparation of meteorological and simulation case studies of significant fire events, the installation and testing of the ACCESS-Fire coupled model on the National Computing Infrastructure, and the preparation of training material to support operational implementation of the project’s research findings.

Celeste Young from Victoria University has completed the 2019/20 annual report for the Diversity and inclusion: building strength and capability project. The report summarises the third phase of the research in which the project team focused their activities around consolidating key findings in the organisational stream and testing these in another industry to look for commonalities and points of divergence. New needs that emerged from the second year review highlight the necessity for further in depth review in relation to the economic and community areas.

Fire coalescence and mass spot fire dynamics: experimentation, modelling and simulation – annual project report 2019-2020 summarises the progress of the first two years of the second phase of the Fire coalescence and mass spotfire dynamics project. The project is continuing to deliver important insights into the dynamics of fire behaviour and fire line interaction, developing the pyrogenic potential model by incorporating firebrand dynamics which has resulted in the world’s first capability to model dynamic modes of fire propagation such as vorticity-driven lateral spread using a two-dimensional simulation framework with a spotting module.

Dr Vinod Kumar, Dr Imtiaz Dharssi and Paul Fox-Hughes from the Bureau of Meteorology, along with Dr Marta Yebra from the Australian National University, have produced a report for the Improving land dryness measures and forecasts project. Exploring the soil moisture-live fuel moisture relationship brings together the Australian Flammability Monitoring System and Joint United Kingdom Land Environment Simulator based Soil Moisture Information to explore the live fuel moisture content–soil moisture relationship on a national scale. The study reports on the preliminary work carried out in understanding live fuel moisture content–soil moisture relationship and suggests an approach that may be constructive in advancing the ability to predict live fuel moisture content reliably to support fire management.

The research team of the Urban planning for natural hazard mitigation project, Prof Alan March (University of Melbourne), Dr Leonardo Nogueira de Moraes (University of Melbourne), A/Prof Hedwig van Delden (Research Institute for Knowledge Systems), A/Prof Janet Stanley (University of Melbourne), Dr Graeme Riddell (University of Adelaide), Prof Stephen Dovers (Australian National University), Prof Ruth Beilin (University of Melbourne) and Prof Holger Maier (University of Adelaide), have written Urban planning and natural hazard risk reduction: critical frameworks for best practice. The report sets out a critical framework to guide improved integration of land use planning and wider natural hazard risk reduction actions to support emergency managers and planning practitioners in the complex task of integrating land use planning and disaster risk reduction in different Australian jurisdictions.

From the University of Tasmania, PhD student James Furlaud, Scott Foyster and Prof David Bowman have written a report for the Re-measurement of burnt permanent plots in Tasmanian wet eucalypt forest - 2019 quick response project. In Using pre- and post-fire LiDAR to assess the severity of the 2019 Tasmanian bushfires: field survey methods the research team present the methodology and next steps of the study, detailing the measurements taken at the 12 permanent plots that burned.

Journal articles

Dr Hing Ho Tsang, Prof John Wilson and Prof Emad Gad from Swinburne University have written a paper related to the Cost-effective mitigation strategy for building related earthquake risk project for the Australian Journal of Structural Engineering. Collapse probability of soft-storey building in Australia and implications for risk-based seismic design discusses the research findings of a study into the rocking response behaviour of precast reinforced concrete columns based on results from previous field testing on parts of a real building and supplemented with a study of their rocking behaviours through a series of shake-table tests.

Published in Environmental Hazards is a journal article by Prof John Handmer and Pascale Maynard from RMIT University. Civil society mobilisation after Cyclone Tracy, Darwin 1974 examines the mobilisation of Darwin and the rest of Australia following the case of Cyclone Tracy and reflects on what this historic case reveals about today’s arrangements for civil society mobilisation. The paper examines what factors make it more or less likely that such surge capacity would be harnessed as effectively today: does the current Australian approach to governance enable or restrict this kind of surge capacity?