Quick Dips

Spreading Like Wildfire

Every year in New Zealand, about 2,000 wildfires burn through 7,000 hectares, of which around 350 ha is plantation forest lands. Predicting where wildfires are most likely to break out, what fuels them and helps them burn, and how rural fire managers can be best prepared to fight them is the aim of a project headed by Grant Pearce and Greg Baxter of Forest Research.

They aim to develop a New Zealand Fire Danger Rating System, which is based on a Canadian plan. Pearce says there are five main objectives:

• development of fire behaviour models for New Zealand fuel types that predict how fast fires will spread under different weather conditions
• a method for assessing the stage of curing (or die-off) of grasslands, which is essential to predicting how a grassland fire will burn
• describing New Zealand's fire climate using historical weather and fire danger data from a network of remote automatic weather stations around the country
• use of a Geographical Information System (GIS) to combine the climatic and physical factors that influence fire behavior, so that maps of current or expected fire danger conditions can be produced
• combining this information into a decision support system that provides this information to New Zealand fire managers to help them better predict and prevent -- and fight -- damaging wildfires

"A knowledge of danger conditions enables forest owners and fire managers to assess potential fire behaviour and respond accordingly, by constantly updating their prevention, detection, preparedness and suppression strategies," Pearce says. "This results in more efficient use of resources, and increased likelihood of successful containment should a wildfire break out."

The project entails joint research with Canadian and Australian fire researchers.