- Title:
-
Fire Management for Minimising Risk: What relationships apply?
- Date:
- April 2006
- Organisations
- Griffith University
- Authors:
- Karen King, Joanne Chapman, Geoff Cary, Ross Bradstock, and Jon Marsden-Smedley
-
Location:
-
Australia,
Australia
Overview
One of the main objectives for fire management is to reduce the risk of negative impacts from unplanned fires on people, property, and ecological values. The present study uses the process based computer simulation model, FIRESCAPE, to identify the relationships between different amounts of management ‘effort’ and fire regime responses. This model has been designed to simulate fire behaviour and fire regimes over long temporal scales, and over topographically complex landscape containing a diversity of vegetation communities. Relationships between treatment unit sizes, the proportion of treatment units burnt annually, and their spatial array on reducing bushfire risk in the World Heritage Area in south west Tasmania were identified. Simulations demonstrated that the annual prescribed burning treatment level had the greatest influence on reducing fire size, fire incidence, and mean annual area burnt by unplanned fires. Both the spatial patterns of treatment units, and the treatment unit size, were significantly more influential on fire size distributions and mean annual areas burnt by unplanned fires than on the incidence of unplanned fires. Improved understanding of these relationships will assist in optimising the use of management resources in minimising the bushfire risk to identified values at a landscape scale.
