With his project focusing on improving fire management decision making, Natural Hazards Research Australia (the Centre) associate student Dr Douglas Radford from the University of Adelaide completed his PhD research to improve fuel management and reduction.
Dr Radford’s love for the environment and his fascination with how people interact with it shaped his research.
“This relationship is incredibly important given the challenges presented by a changing climate and pressures that we have placed on the ecosystems that we ultimately depend on,” Doug said.
Doug said he hopes his work will help us to “reflect on the types of values that we are preferencing (or not) when we make decisions and to acknowledge the complexity of the challenges associated with fire management decisions.”
“Agencies have a very tricky role in terms of navigating uncertainty and facilitating or achieving a wide range of needs and objectives,” he said.
“Some of the tools I've explored might help them to better play that role, but ultimately the purpose of the tools is to facilitate better conversations about what matters to us and our communities.”
His research thesis outlines that landscape fire simulation models used to evaluate fuel treatments, including prescribed burns, take a lot of time and computing power to run.
Doug overcame this challenge by developing a simpler model that accurately estimates where fires are likely to burn. This model can be used instead of a landscape fire simulation model to optimise fuel management and reduction.
Doug said the value of his association with the Centre during this project was the opportunities to attend its forums, “learn from some really incredible thinkers and build a community of early career researcher with whom I'm sharing a research journey.”
“One of the best parts of the Centre and the natural hazards community space at large, is the diversity of perspectives, ideas and needs that are – and need to be – represented,” Doug said.
“I have a technical and engineering background, so the opportunity to listen to and understand other perspectives has offered me a lot of important opportunity to reflect on how my work might be situated amongst and support other areas of the natural hazards space.”