The Australian Flammability Monitoring System

Flammability is strongly determined by the amount of moisture in the dead and living vegetation matter. Fire services and land managers need the information of fuel moisture content to undertake hazard reduction burns, to prepare for the fire season, and to anticipate the difficulty of suppressing bushfires throughout the fire season. At present, very simple equations are used to get an approximate estimate of flammability. Marta will introduce the purpose and science of the Australian Flammability Monitoring System (AFMS), the first continental-scale prototype web service providing spatial information on Live Fuel Moisture Content (LFMC) and landscape flammability conditions derived from satellite observations.

Marta Yebra is a Senior Researcher at the ANU-Fenner School of Environment and Society and mission specialist of the ANU-Institute of Space. Her main background is in remote sensing of vegetation biophysical properties for spatial fire risk analysis, carbon sequestration and water balance studies.

This talk was presented as part of the Wednesday Seminar series 26 June 2019