Assisting mitigation of bushfire threat in regional Australia through MODIS imagery based media GIS

Assisting mitigation of bushfire threat in regional Australia through MODIS imagery based media GIS

Bushfires have been part of the Australian environment since before human settlement of the continent. Some Australian flora and fauna has evolved to coexist with bushfires, and in the case of eucalypt forest, fire forms an integral part of its regeneration cycle. Today, bushfires have become the dominant phenomenon in Australian natural hazards. According to the Australian bureau of meteorology, the whole southern half of Australia is at fire risk in summer and autumn months. Australian bureau of Criminology published a bushfire damage recorded from 1967 to 1999, and estimated the cost as about $2.5 billion excluding forestry losses. The public attention to bushfire disasters reached to a new peak, after the disastrous Black Saturday bushfire in Victoria. The Black Saturday bushfires in 2009 killed 173 injured 500 more and cause over $2.5 billion in damages. Annually, fire authorities respond to an average 54,000 bushfires in Australia where up to 50% of these fires are deliberately lit or start in suspicious circumstances. This grave situation of bushfire damage encourages researches to explore various bushfire mitigation scenarios. The present study focuses on educating the rural communities by awakening their participation in fire mitigation efforts using semi-real time fire information. In Australia, fire prevention related agencies work extensively to make available various data sources for public and schools. However, the flow of information to rural communities is not smooth due to various technical and social reasons, though their participation is vital. 'I could see the real value of us educating the locals,' said Glenn O’Rourke, Deputy Captain and Community Safety Officer at the Wollombi Rural Fire Brigade. This study discusses an approach to educate rural communities through Media GIS contents based on daily MODIS imagery. These bushfire contents can be uploaded daily to local newspapers, TV, and to mobile subscribers to establish a participatory user cohort. Google functions such as placemarks will be used in KML environment to deliver media GIS contents as spot/image information. Collected Participatory GIS inputs will be used to enrich the GIS database to further enhancements of the communication process on bushfire developments.