Dr Thomas Duff

Researcher
About
Dr Thomas Duff

Thomas is a forest scientist who has focused on the quantification of natural patterns in forested landscapes.  His doctoral research focused on methods to better understand the way plants vary through the landscape in response to environmental pattern, including fires, variation in weather and soil.  He is now working on a project which is focused on understanding and simulating the spread of bushfires as they occur in the landscape..

Prior to returning to study, Thomas worked in native forest management (with a focus on fire), a development project in Vietnam, and more recently as a consultant in native and plantation forestry throughout the Asia-pacific.  

Project leadership

This study is identifying the thresholds beyond which dynamic fire behaviour becomes a dominant factor, the effects that these dynamic effects have on the overall power output of a fire, and the impacts that such dynamic effects have on fire severity. This will necessarily include consideration of other factors such as how fine fuel moisture varies across a landscape. The research team is investigating the conditions and processes under which bushfire behaviour undergoes major transitions, including fire convection and plume dynamics, evaluating the consequences of eruptive fire behaviour (spotting, convection driven wind damage, rapid fire spread) and determining the combination of conditions for such behaviours to occur (unstable atmosphere, fuel properties and weather conditions).
Research team:
This project was commissioned and funded entirely by the Safer Together program.
Extreme fire behaviours: Surveying fire management staff to determine behaviour frequencies and importance
19 Sep 2018
Extreme fire behaviours (EFBs) are phenomena that occur within intense fires that have been shown...
Gaining benefits from adversity: standardising data obtained from bushfires
29 Jun 2017
The limited availability of high quality data about bushfires restricts the rate at which research...
Trent Penman Conference Poster 2016
14 Aug 2016
The bushfire behaviour and management group of the University of Melbourne is conducting a project...
Kevin Tolhurst Conference Poster 2016
14 Aug 2016
This project aims to better describe the nature of bushfires, especially very severe ones, and the...
Anders Siggins Conference Poster 2016
14 Aug 2016
The Victorian Government is committed to objective reporting of fuel management activities in terms...

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