A fire regime risk management tool

Abstract

Wildfires can cause significant damage to people, property and the environment. For example, the 2009 Black Saturday Fires resulted in the loss of 173 lives and over 2000 houses. These fires affected large areas of natural forest with a high value to society, in particular as catchments that provide Melbourne with drinking water and the habitat of threatened biodiversity. While these fires were the most destructive in human terms, the quantification of the existing and future risk posed from wildfire to multiple assets requires consideration of the total fire regime over a multi-decadal scale (Penman et al. 2014) and not just single events. Fire regimes are the spatial expression of area burned over multiple years which includes consideration of fire frequency, intensity, heterogeneity and seasonality (Gill 1975; Whelan 1995). Fire management agencies seek to alter the fire regime to reduce risk to all assets however no actions universally reduce risk to all asset types. For example, fuel treatments are commonly used to reduce risk to people and property, but this can be to the detriment of environmental assets (Penman et al. 2011a). The challenge is therefore to develop management strategies that simultaneously satisfy the gamut of management objectives (Driscoll et al. 2010). Here we present a new fire regime tool which builds on the PHOENIX RapidFire Fire Behaviour Simulator, hereafter PHOENIX. PHOENIX simulates fire behaviour based on empirically derived models for a range of environments based on fuel loads, topography and weather. The fire regime tool provides a novel simulation approach to quantify the risk to houses, ecological assets, water and carbon posed by natural and anthropogenic fire regimes. In doing so, the model allows for comparison of risk to assets over a range of realistic fuel management strategies across a landscape, as well as basic suppression responses.