- Title:
-
What Determines Area Burned? Relative importance of fuel management, ignition management and weather in five landscape-fire-succession models
- Date:
- September 2008
- Organisations
- AFAC 2009 Conference
- Authors:
- Geoff Cary; Mike Flannigan; Bob Keane; Ross Bradstock; Ian Davies; Jim Lenihan; Chao Li; Kim Logan; Russ Parsons
- Location:
- Australia, Australia
Overview
The International Bushfire Research Conference 2008 - incorporating The 15th annual AFAC Conference, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Debates over the relative importance of fuel management, ignition management and year-to-year variation in weather in determining area burned by unplanned fires are controversial and lack consensus.
We investigated the relative importance of these factors in a standardized simulation design involving five landscape fire models (CAF, FIRESCAPE, LAMOS(HS), LANDSUM and SEM-LAND) from around the world. Importance was measured as the proportion of variation in total number of pixels burned that was explained by each factor and all interactions among them within each model.
In all models, weather and ignition management were consistently more important in determining modelled area burned compared with fuel management approach and effort. A lower ignition management effort resulted in a greater area burned in all of the models, as did more severe weather years. When variation in total pixels burned was analysed separately for each of the different fuel management approaches, variation in fuel management effort was found to be important for the random fuel management approach in one model.
By comparison, when the number of edge pixels burned was analysed separately, effort in managing fuel at landscape edges was important in three of the five models.
Our results suggest that inter-annual variation in weather and the extent of success in ignition management consistently prevail over the effects of fuel management in determining area burned in a range of modelled ecosystems for around the world. Greatest protection of assets adjacent to the edge of vegetated landscapes will likely arise if fuel management is co-located there.
