Student researcher

Dr Yang Zhang Research Leader

This study is incorporating geospatial information in exploring how top-down and bottom-up drivers regulate fire occurrence and how the relationships between them vary spatially in south eastern Australia, with the aim of providing practical guidance for fire management.

Wildfires are a common occurrence in South-Eastern Australia. The limitation of resources and the requirements for quick responses demand prediction of locations where fires will occur. Employing fire records within empirical models is essential to quantify the characteristics of fire occurrence to support planning and decision-making. These models can be used to identify fire-prone areas to help forest managers target suppression efforts. The spatial distributions of fires are usually regulated by top-down and bottom-up drivers across multiple scales. Although fire occurrence studies have been conducted at regional scales in Australia, the drivers of state-scale patterns of fire occurrence are not well understood. The variation of the relative importance of environmental and anthropogenic factors is also unclear. The proposed study will incorporate geospatial information in exploring how the divers regulate fire occurrence and how the relationships between them vary spatially in South-Eastern Australia, with the aim to provide practical guidance for fire management