Savanna fire

New tools have been developed to assess and improve fire management, providing metrics that allow land managers to better measure the effect of fire. 

By Amy Mulder from the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC. This article was first published in Issue Two 2020 of Fire Australia.

A savanna-wide fire-mapping program has been developed to assist fire managers across northern Australia in assessing the effectiveness of planned burns. In the vast landscape of Australia's fire-prone north, fuel reduction is the main tool for reducing bushfire risk.

The Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC project Tools supporting fire management in northern Australia has created sophisticated mapping and modelling tools to assist fire managers. An outcome of the work, the Savanna Monitoring and Evaluation Reporting Framework (SMERF), provides web-based, savanna-wide fire mapping to assist land managers with fire planning across large areas of land.

The online program evaluates the effects of fire where burnt-area mapping is available across the Northern Territory, and large parts of Western Australia and northern Queensland. It assesses nearly 20 years of data to show where bushfires have burnt, at what time of year (early or late dry seasons) and when an area was last burnt. 

 CRC researcher Dr Andrew Edwards from Charles Darwin University explained that SMERF provides a meaningful suite of metrics to support fire and land managers. 

“The data out of SMERF are really useful means—and probably the only means we have at the moment—of evaluating the effects of fire and improved or not-improved fire regimes, from an ecological perspective,” said Dr Edwards.

“The information from the reports will be able to be used to apply local, ecological and traditional knowledge to improve biodiversity and landscape management.”

While web-based tools that cover Australia’s tropical savannas and rangelands have provided satellite-derived burnt-area mapping for more than 20 years, SMERF distils existing monitoring and evaluation reports and incorporates information gathered from workshops and interviews with land and fire managers, as well as the scientific literature and case studies.

“SMERF has standardised monitoring and evaluation, making it readily accessible for all levels of land management for nearly 70% of continental Australia. SMERF can also be applied wherever fire history mapping is available, at any scale,” Dr Edwards said.

Reports on all national parks are available, with plans to be expanded into all properties in northern Australia.

SMERF's easy-to-use, flexible reports are available here.