This project investigated which landscape features act as barriers to fire spread and their relative effectiveness in the fire-prone tropical savannas. This investigation was achieved by examining fire edges across northern Australia using long-term satellite-derived fire histories.
Two long-term (2000-2021) satellite-derived burnt area datasets were used to create fire edge metrics; continental scale MODIS-derived fire mapping available on the NAFI website and Landsat/Sentinel-2 scale mapping produced for north Kimberley Fire Abatement Projects (NKFAP). From these two burnt area data-sets a sum of all fire edges for the mapped years was produced. These edge frequency datasets were then divided by the total fire frequency to produce a value representing the proportion of fires that stopped. Where a fire only stopped once the extinction is assumed to have been associated with spatially uncorrelated weather conditions. To remove these more random fire weather effects, cells with a fire frequency of one were set to zero before dividing by fire frequency data.
MODIS edge data download:
MODIS_Edge_Sum_2000-2021_wgs.tif
MOD_ALL_EDG_NORMALISED_00-21_wgs.tif
For more details, see the Journal of Environmental Management publication:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479721019265.
Fisher, R., Lewis, B., Price, O. and Pickworth, A., 2022. Barriers to fire spread in northern Australian tropical savannas, deriving fire edge metrics from long term high-frequency fire histories. Journal of environmental management, 301, p.113864.