Published works

Many Australian fire managers rely on fuel maps derived from vegetation classifications and time-since-fire via an accumulation curve (e.g. Phoenix Rapidfire). However fuel maps derived using this method lack potentially critical information about pockets of high and low fuel loads. This is important because a poor understanding of fuels was found to be a critical factor in investigations of both the Margaret River and Lancefield prescribed burn escapes. A potential solution for this problem is the use of LiDAR to create spatially-explicit fuel information.

A LiDAR dataset covering the whole of the ACT was flown over a number of months in 201516 using the LAS 1.4 format. The density of returns was 8ppm over the urban area and 4ppm over the remainder of the territory including a large alpine national park that covers 45 percent of the ACT. Bushfire & Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre (BNHCRC) research partners arranged for the dataset to be included in feasibility analyses conducted by the Terrestrial Ecology Research Network (TERN) AusCover Landscape Observatory project. A number of fuel-related layers were created based on the Overall Fuel Hazard Assessment (OFHA) and inputs to Project Vesta.

The fuel layers were created at resolutions of 1m, 2m, 5m and 25m in the NetCDF file format. The 25m data were selected for initial assessment because these were the only whole-of-territory datasets easily manipulated in ArcGIS 10. Qualitative assessments indicate: 1) a discernible pattern of fuel variation related to topography; 2) good agreement between LiDAR-derived elevated and near-surface fuel layers and OFHA data collected during the LiDAR acquisition; and 3) good agreement between the LiDAR and fire severity assessments made on burns that were conducted a short time before the acquisition. The next step is to conduct quantitative assessments.