New online - October 2020

The latest CRC research, which includes final project reports, journal articles, a book chapter and student thesis, is now available on the website. Read all the details in October’s summary below.

Book chapter

Associate student Constanza Gonzalez-Mathiesen and Prof Alan March from the University of Melbourne have co-authored a chapter in Understanding Disaster Risk: A Multidimensional Approach, published by Elsevier. Developing guidelines for increasing the resilience of informal settlements exposed to wildfire risk using a risk-based planning approach reports on the production of guidelines to develop resilience to wildfires for communities living in informal settlements exposed to wildfire risk and relates to Costanza’s PhD project, Urban planning and resilience to bushfires.

CRC final reports

With the From hectares to tailor-made solutions for risk mitigation project now complete, the final report detailing the research findings is now available. The key finding of the project is that the effectiveness of prescribed burning at mitigating area burnt by bushfire and other key values varies considerably across landscapes and values. This has major implications for fire managers, suggesting that tailored prescribed burning solutions are possible based on the unique risk mitigation profile for any given suite of management values in that region. The key product of the project is the Prescribed Burning Atlas, a new website that informs prescribed burning strategies and helps fire and land managers tailor their approaches to outcomes that will best reduce risk in a target area within available budgets. The research team comprised of Dr Hamish Clarke (University of Wollongong & Western Sydney University), Brett Cirulis (University of Melbourne), A/Prof Trent Penman (University of Melbourne), Dr Owen Price (University of Wollongong), Dr Matthias Boer (Western Sydney University) and Prof Ross Bradstock (University of Wollongong).

The Mapping bushfire hazard and impacts project has been completed and the research team from the Australian National University, Dr Marta Yebra, Prof Albert van Dijk and Dr Geoff Cary, have written the final project report. Over six years, the project used cutting-edge technology to produce near-real-time spatial information on fuel condition, fire hazard and impact to support a wide range of fire risk management and response activities such as hazard reduction burning and pre-positioning firefighting resources and, in the longer term, the new Australian Fire Danger Rating System. Based on the research findings, the researchers have produced the Australian Flammability Monitoring System, an interactive map of immediate fire danger associated with landscape dryness, which uses satellites to collect information about moisture content in trees, shrubs and grass, and assists with prescribed burning efforts and assessment of firefighting resources.

CRC reports

The 2019/20 annual report for the Fire surveillance and hazard mapping project has been written by Dr Bryan Hally, Dr Karin Reinke, Luke Wallace and Prof Simon Jones from RMIT University. The highlights of the project include the delivery and completion of end-user trials using the Fuels3D iPhone and 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.

From the University of Tasmania, A/Prof Benjamin Brooks and Dr Steven Curnin have written a report for the Improving decision-making in complex multi-team environments project. The Follow up of study participants: brain plasticity and divergent thinking report identifies the results from a series of interviews conducted with end-user participants to understand the utilisation of the research provided in the series of workshops on divergent thinking.

Prof Michael Griffith from the University of Adelaide has written the 2019/20 annual report for the Cost-effective mitigation strategy development for building related earthquake risk project. The report contains a summary of research undertaken by four partner institutions towards the development of cost-effective seismic retrofit methods for vulnerable Australian buildings.

Journal articles

A/Prof Michael Eburn (Australian National University) has written a paper related to the Policies, institutions and governance project for the Bulletin (Law Society of South Australia). Emergency powers: civil liberties in the face of disaster reviews the power of government to impose restrictions during a public health emergency and argues that traditional emergency managers should not be tempted to try and copy the use of directions backed with the threat of force and penalties to ensure compliance but should, instead, continue to focus on community education and building resilience.

Research by James McGlade, Luke Wallace, Dr Bryan Hally, Andrew White, Dr Karin Reinke and Prof Simon Jones from RMIT University was published in the Remote Sensing Letters journal. Their paper, An early exploration of the use of the Microsoft Azure Kinect for estimation of urban tree Diameter at Breast Height, relates to the Fire surveillance and hazard mapping project and assesses the accuracy and potential application of the Microsoft Azure Kinect – a lightweight depth sensor – for outdoor measurement of tree stem Diameter at Breast Height.

Luke Wallace, Dr Bryan Hally, Sam Hillman, Prof Simon Jones and Dr Karin Reinke were also published in Fire with their journal article, Terrestrial image-based point clouds for mapping near-ground vegetation structure: potential and limitations, in which they explore the use of image-based point clouds generated from imagery captured using a low-cost compact camera for describing the fuel hazard within the surface and near-surface layers.

Relating to the Improving decision-making in complex multi-team environments project is a new journal article published in Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy. To support innovation in strategic planning, A/Prof Benjamin Brooks and Dr Steven Curnin from the University of Tasmania have combined research on creativity, divergent thinking, and creative constraints to design a method called “Stretch‐Thinking Loops” which uses iterative thinking approaches to identify new opportunities and innovations to support scenario planning. They report on the development of this technique in the context of crisis management in Stretch-Thinking Loops: a new technique for scenario planning.

The article Variation in Eucalyptus delegatensis post-fire recovery strategies: the Tasmanian subspecies is a resprouter whereas the mainland Australian subspecies is an obligate seeder by Dario Rodriguez Cubillo, Dr Lynda Prior and Prof David Bowman from the University of Tasmania was published in the Forest Ecology and Management journal. The research relates to Dario’s PhD project, Landscape ecology of fire – lessons from Tasmanian wilderness and highlights that mature Eucalyptus delegatensis forests in Tasmania are more resilient to single high-severity fires than their mainland counterparts because they can recover more quickly through epicormic resprouting.

Published in the Journal of Southern Hemisphere Earth System Science is the article Climatology of wind changes and elevated fire danger over Victoria, Australia by Graham Mills (Monash University), Dr Sarah Harris (Monash University, Country Fire Authority), Dr Timothy Brown (Desert Research Institute) and Alex Chen (Country Fire Authority). Relating to the Understanding the impact of climate change on fire weather variables project, the paper used a recently developed high spatial and temporal resolution homogeneous gridded fire weather climatology data set to generate a climatology of wind change strength by season across Victoria to offer important information for fire weather forecasters and fire practitioners when preparing for a fire season or managing a fire campaign.

CRC student completions

Dr Maryam Nasim’s PhD thesis Damage modelling of reinforced concrete bridge piers under flood and log impact has been accepted by RMIT University. Dr Nasim’s project, Investigation into the behaviours of a U-slab bridge due to flood, investigates the best approach for numerical modelling and general vulnerability modelling of U-slab bridges which can be used by end-users to evaluate the effect of flood loading on structure.