New journal articles and reports on CRC research are available online.
Under the Enabling sustainable emergency volunteering project, a report has been released that examines the sustainability of formal emergency management volunteering into the future in the face of the changing external environment. Emergency Volunteering 2030: Views from Managers in Volunteerism by Dr Blythe McLennan and Dr Tarn Kruger presents the results from 34 interviews with managers that have responsibilities for volunteerism in Australian emergency management organisations. The managers were interviewed from organisations with primary response roles as well as from organisations that have important community support roles across preparedness, response, relief, and recovery. This report is one of a series of environmental scan reports being prepared through the study that capture diverse views of the current and emerging landscape of emergency volunteering. The environmental scan reports will be synthesised and presented to an expert panel that will assist researchers in developing the future volunteering scenarios.
From the Remote Sensing of Environment journal, a paper from the Mapping bushfire hazard and impacts project examines the historical background and current developments for mapping burned area from satellite Earth observation. Emilio Chuvieco, Florent Mouillot, Guido R. van der Werf, Jesús San Miguel, Mihai Tanasse, Nikos Koutsias, Mariano García, Marta Yebra, Marc Padilla, Ioannis Gitas, Angelika Heil, Todd J. Hawbaker and Louis Gigliok describe the historical background and current developments for mapping burned areas and explores the physical basis to detect burned area from satellite Earth observation. The paper describes the historical trends of using satellite sensors to monitor burned areas, summarises the most recent approaches to map burned areas, evaluates the existing burned area products (both at global and regional scales) and identifies potential future opportunities to further improve burned area detection from Earth observation satellites.
The Tools supporting fire management in northern Australia project has had two papers published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire. Delivering effective savanna fire management for defined biodiversity conservation outcomes: an Arnhem Land case study byDr Jay Evans and Adj Prof Jeremy Russell-Smith documents how delivering effective savanna fire management for defined biodiversity conservation outcomes changes in fire regime in the western Arnhem Land region of northern Australia. Over a 12-year period, the regional fire regime has transitioned from late dry season, wildfire-dominated to being characterised by a majority of fires occurring as small early dry season prescribed burns. Although overall area burnt has not significantly decreased, most ecological threshold metrics have improved, with the exception of those describing the maintenance of longer-unburnt habitat.
The second paper describes the challenges for prescribed fire management in Australia’s fire-prone rangelands.Authored by Adj Prof Jeremy Russel-Smith, Dr Andrew Edwards, Dr Kamaljit Sangha, Dr Cameron Yates and Mark Gardener, the paper examines the status of contemporary prescribed burning activities in the Northern Territory over a 1.4 × 106 km2, sparsely settled area characterised by vast flammable landscapes, few barriers to firespread, predominantly anthropogenic ignitions, and limited institutional resources and capacity. The findings of the paper show that prescribed fire management is shown to be restricted to specific locales, and that for more effective landscape-scale fire management, potential solutions include engagement with dispersed remote communities and incorporation of Indigenous Ranger Groups into the fire management network, and building on the success of savanna burning greenhouse gas emission projects as an example for incentivising landscape fire and emergency management services generally.
Available in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation is a paper titledLimitations of high-resolution satellite stereo imagery for estimating canopy height in Australian tropical savannas. The paper is from CRC PhD student Grigorijs Goldbergs, A/Prof Stefan Maier, Shaun Levick and Dr Andrew Edwards and evaluates the potential of stereo imagery from commercially available very high-resolution satellites as an alternative for estimating canopy height variables in Australian tropical savannas, using a semi-global dense matching image-based technique. The paper, assesses and compares the completeness and vertical accuracy of extracted canopy height models from GeoEye 1 and WorldView 1 very high-resolution satellite stereo pairs and summarised the factors influencing image matching effectiveness and quality. The findings show that stereo dense matching using the semi-global dense matching technique severely underestimates tree presence and canopy height, and suggest that current commercially available very high resolution satellite data (0.5 m resolution) are not well suited to estimating canopy height variables, and therefore above ground biomass, in Eucalyptus dominated north Australian tropical savanna woodlands.
Three reports have been published from the quick response fund. The first looks at the flood impacts on Townsville after the February 2019 flooding. The Townsville 2019 flood: insights from the field report by Andrew Gissing, James O’Brien, Salomé Hussein, Jacob Evans and Thomas Mortlock of Risk Frontiers documents unstructured interviews with residents and business operators that were undertaken to gain preliminary insights into impacts and responses to warnings and to examine initial recovery. In total, more than 20 residents and six business operators were spoken to. The report highlights key preliminary themes that arose from this research, such as the effectiveness of the warnings issued during the flood and the community’s disaster recovery progress.
The second report looks at the impacts of the 2016 Tasmanian bushfires on the Pencil Pine population within the region. The report Relicts at Risk: Impacts of the 2016 Tasmanian Fires on Pencil Pine (Athrotaxis Cupressoides) investigates the 2016 fires Tasmania’s Wilderness World Heritage Area that burnt long-held fire refugia using a field survey to assess the impact of this fire on the region’s Pencil Pine population. Aimee Bliss, Lynda Prior and Prof David Bowman conducted the research, with the results from the study illustrating that high intensity wildfire in Tasmania’s alpine environments had significant detrimental effects on the Pencil Pine population. The study shows that the 2016 Tasmanian wildfire at Lake Mackenzie has had demonstrable detrimental effects on Pencil Pine populations within the fire perimeter, and the accumulative impacts of the fire with time, will likely cause these populations to become locally extinct.
The third report investigates the understanding of post-fire fuel dynamics using burnt permanent forest plots in northern Queensland. South west Western Australia and northern Tasmania. The report, Understanding Post-Fire Fuel Dynamics using Burnt Permanent Forest Plots by CRC PhD student James Furlaud and Prof David Bowman, analyses the empirical measurements of fuel loads within the first year after a fire to complement the measurements of fuel loads taken directly before the fires. It utilises the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) Ausplot Forests network, a long-term ecological monitoring network of 48 one hectare plots in mature, tall, wet eucalypt forest. The study has revealed that the effect of planned burning on fuel loads is highly dependent on region and varies among the fuel layers. It notes that planned burning is quite effective at reducing fuel loads and fire danger in regions characterised by large fuel loads and bad fire weather, however, surface fuel loads can recover quite quickly after a low severity burn in regions where they were not particularly high to begin with.
Two CRC PhD students have had their thesis accepted.
Dr Sarah Hall has had her PhD thesis, Sleep and stress in on-call fire and emergency service workers, accepted by Deakin University. Published last year, her research on sleep and stress in on-call fire and emergency service workers outlined how some aspects of sleep quantity and quality may be affected when on-call. Her findings showed that the two main stress systems are largely unaffected by on-call work, with the exception of the cortisol awakening response. Two characteristics of the cortisol awakening response were blunted when on-call with a night callout compared to when off-call
Associate student Dr Ken Strahan completed his thesis on factors influencing householder self-evacuation in two Australian bushfires at RMIT University in 2017. His thesis investigated householder self-evacuation decision-making during bushfires in the Perth and Adelaide Hills in 2014 and 2015. It explored the factors that influenced householders’ decisions to evacuate, identified factors that predict self-evacuation and established the characteristics of self-evacuators. A mixed methods research strategy was used involving quantitative telephone surveys of 457 bushfire-affected participants and face-to-face interviews of 109 participants in 59 households. The research concluded that environmental and social cues and warnings and householders’ perceptions of the threat, of hazard adjustments and of other stakeholders, influenced self-evacuation decision-making. Protective action perceptions, particularly the effectiveness of evacuating or not evacuating in protecting personal safety or property, were most important in predicting self-evacuation. The findings suggest that future research on those who wait and see during a bushfire should take account of their decisional rules of thumb and that design and targeting of Australian bushfire safety policy should better account for self-evacuator characteristics.
Associate student Andrea Massetti has co-written a journal article with Christoph Rudiger, Dr Marta Yebra and James Hilton on the Vegetation Structure Perpendicular Index (VSPI). Published in Remote sensing of Environment, the paper looks at the many empirical fire spread models that have been developed to predict the spread and overall behaviour of a bushfire, based on a range of parameters such as weather and fuel conditions. Fuel condition data include variables such as vegetation quantity, structure and moisture content and, in the event of previous bushfires, the burn severity and stage of ecosystem recovery. The VSPI utilises the short-wave infrared reflectance in bands centred at 1.6 and 2.2 μm, essentially representing the amount and structure of the vegetation's woody biomass (as opposed to the photosynthetic activity and moisture content). The index has been developed and applied to major bushfires within eucalypt forests throughout southern Australia to estimate both burn severity and time to recovery. The VSPI can provide an improved information layer for fire risk evaluation and operational predictions of wildfire behaviour.