Framework for an Australian fuel classification to support bushfire management

Summary

Quantification of fire-prone vegetation is a challenge for land and fire managers who need explicit fuel data to support fire management decision-making. Fuel characteristics including the distribution of fuel elements by size class, live and dead components, compactness, and horizontal and vertical continuity are important determinants of fire behaviour and key to understanding suppression difficulty and assessing the risk of damage from bushfires. Furthermore, fuel characteristics are critical for evaluating ecological effects of fire including thermal impacts on vegetation and soil, and smoke emissions. Australian land and fire managers have recognised the need for a national-level fuel classification to provide an adequate and consistent method of characterising and categorising fuels. Here we introduce the concept and framework for a fuel classification scheme for Australian vegetation. This framework arises from extensive consultation with land managers and rural fire authorities, and a review of other classification systems used throughout the world. The Bushfire Fuel Classification (BFC) is based on a top-down approach with three hierarchically linked tiers suitable for a variety of fire management applications. The level of detail to which a fuel complex is described varies from a coarse description for the top tier to precise information in the third (bottom) tier. A case study application of the new fuel classification to an area of south-western Australia is presented to illustrate the process of converting vegetation types into the top-level tier fuel types.

Keywords:

• fuels
• classification
• structure
• fire behaviour
• Australia

Acknowledgments

We thank the Australasian Fire and Emergency Services Authorities Council (AFAC), Forest Fire Management Group (FFMG) and the Attorney General’s Department (project NP1011-0046 National Fuel Classification System within the National Emergency Management Program) for providing the opportunity and funding to report on the scope and framework for a Bushfire Fuel Classification.

We value contributions of practitioner and research participants within the AFAC (PPM2.b) working group and at two ‘National Bushfire Fuel Classification’ workshops organised by AFAC in 2011 and 2012. Special thanks to Tom Jovanovic for his contribution to the case study GIS mapping exercise.

We appreciate comments and suggestions from Kevin Tolhurst, Jon Marsden-Smedley and Malcolm Gill on the early development of the BFC. We also thank Marty Alexander, Roger Ottmar, Kevin Tolhurst and Michael Doherty and two anonymous reviewers for providing valuable comments on an early version of this manuscript.