Abstract
Abstract. In 2019/20 over 100 severe bushfires burned across the continent of Australia. The severity of these fires was exacerbated by many factors, including macroclimatic effects of global warming and, at the meso and micro scales, land management practices. The bushfire phenomenon cannot be stopped, however better management practices can help counter the increasing severity of fires. Hazard reduction burning is a method where certain vegetation is deliberately burned under controlled circumstances to thin the fuel to reduce the severity of bushfires. Fuel load is an important parameter to assess when hazard reduction burning, as the accumulation of vegetation in a forest profile affects the intensity of the burn. Conventional methods of measuring fuel load are time consuming and costly, and therefore it becomes increasingly important to investigate automated approaches for assessing fuel loads. This paper provides an overview of hazard reduction burning while explaining the methods to quantify fuel load. Then the paper presents our voxel approach in estimating the volume of fuel loads. The first results regarding different voxel resolutions are reported and analysed. This paper concludes with future steps and developments.
Highlights
Global warming has induced the world’s climate to change relatively abruptly
This paper presents our voxel approach to estimate the volume of Fuel Load (FL) with appropriate resolution for the site
The classification of terrain and canopy was performed by investigating the voxel resolution and assumptions for lowest and highest possible LiDAR points in the data set
Summary
Global warming has induced the world’s climate to change relatively abruptly. This climate change has forced the world to transition into a new climatic state, where natural disasters are predicted to occur with increasing frequency and severity costing lives, destroying infrastructure and disrupting established cycle (Wahlquist 2019, Gomes 2020). Increasing temperature causes vegetation to dry at a faster rate, and the dryer the vegetation, the easier it is to ignite. This is resulting in bushfires with a high burn-severity (Kose, Nikos et al 2008). The study of bushfires includes landscape systems and time phases. It is a multi-stakeholder, multi-variable and multi-scale problem. Hazard Reduction (HR) burning has become one of the resolute applications in the management of fire prone ecosystems worldwide, where certain vegetation is deliberately burned under controlled circumstances to thin the fuel and reduce the severity of bushfires (Vigilante and Thornton 2016).
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