CREATING A REPORT ON FIRE (April 2011) The Fire Report feature on the NAFI website lets you create simple summaries of fire activity for areas of land in far northern Australia (north of 20 degrees where fire mapping is more comprehensive and reliable). This feature is suitable for areas of land greater than 100 squ kms and presents fire histories as graphs, tables and maps for your selected area and presents the results in a Portable Document Format (PDF). SELECTING AN AREA...... 2 CREATING REPORTS.... 4 SAVING AND PRINTING REPORTS 8 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS..... 8 1
SELECTING AN AREA When you open the Fire Reports menu you first need to select an area that you want a fire report on. The drop-down menu at the top allows you to choose from different methods of selecting an area and an option to clear any selected area (circled) These are described in more detail below. Draw your own boundary allows you to define your own area to profile. Clicking on this option reveals two buttons - "Mark" and "Set". Firstly, use the controls in the lower left of the map to zoom and pan to your region of interest (more properties become visible as you zoom in). Then outline your precise area of interest by clicking on the "Mark" button, and move the mouse cursor onto the boundary of your area of interest and trace out the boundary with the mouse using a series of anti-clockwise clicks (no area will be selected if you move in a clock-wise direction). Your area boundary will appear as a pink line as shown below. 2
When you have joined up the boundary, click the "Set" button. If you want to change your boundary or draw it again, just select the clear option in the dropdown menu (circled in green on page 2) and start again. If you draw your own boundary, you are limited to areas between 100 and 20,000 square kilometres and your boundary must be drawn with less than 50 clicks of the mouse you will receive warning messages about this. You can name these user-defined areas for any reports you create by typing a name in the Name area box. Current map boundary uses the rectangular border of the map you are looking at as your selected area. As with the Draw your own boundary option, you are limited to areas between 100 and 20,000 square kilometres. You can enter your own name for these map boundary areas. Clear If you want to change your map boundary select the Clear option from the drop-down menu. You can also choose from the following pre-set areas at moment only available for the NT, but some will be available for other jurisdictions soon. Properties allows you to select from a list of the larger northern pastoral properties in the NT. Click on the property you want to profile. Not all pastoral properties are included in this list. Park & Reserves allows you to select any of the larger northern National Parks and reserves in the NT. Clicking on this option will reveal another drop-down menu which lists these parks and reserves in alphabetical order. Click on the park or reserve you want to profile. Smaller reserves are excluded as the fire mapping is too coarse to give reliable results for these areas. Indigenous Protected Area allows you to choose from one of the two Arnhem Land Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs) associated with the West Arnhem Fire Abatement Project. Click on the IPA you want to profile. Whatever method you choose to select your area, once it is selected a wait message will appear on the map Updating map, please wait... and shortly you should see your selected area highlighted on the map in white surrounded by grey as shown below in the case of a National Park (if you selected Current map boundary, you will see a thin grey boundary around the map). 3
CREATING REPORTS Once you have selected your area you can download a range of pre-set fire history profiles for the area by choosing from the tick-boxes on the menu below. You can select a Fire History by Year report which has tick-boxes for the years you want to include in the report Or one of three other reports on fire frequency and time since fire can be selected Once the type of report has been selected, click this button to generate the report. A wait message will appear briefly, and shortly you will see a Download Report link below the Generate Report button click on this to download the pdf report. 4
The details of the various reports follow. Fire History by Year Report This report lists the areas of country burnt each month for the years 2004 2010 (or any shorter period) as well as areas that were not burnt in your selected area. As well as a table, the report graphs the monthly distribution of fire for each year as shown below: Such data can be useful in identifying the type of fire pattern your selected area has been experiencing in recent years and allow you to see how this pattern may be changing. For example the area above has a consistent fire pattern dominated by extensive late dry season burning, particularly in October and little burning earlier in the dry season. 5
Fire Frequency Report This report shows the fire frequency experienced by various areas within your selected area over the last seven years (2004-2010). The report provides a table, map and graph an example is shown below: These reports can be useful in identifying areas within a property that are subject to either very frequent fires or very few fires and in measuring progress in changing or maintaining fire frequencies in those areas. 6
Late Fire Frequency Report This is the same as the Fire Frequency Report above, but shows only the frequency of fires in the late dry season (occurring after July 31) affecting your area of interest. Year Last Burnt Report This report shows the years in which various parts of your selected area were last burnt. Again it shows this information as a table, a map and a graph. An example is shown below. These reports can be useful for monitoring progress in protecting areas that are sensitive to frequent fire and that need to remain unburnt for a number of years. 7
SAVING AND PRINTING REPORTS Once your pdf report is produced, you will need to save it to your computer and rename it. Depending on your pdf reader you should be able to do this using the file menu as shown below or by clicking on a disc icon in the menu bar above the pdf. Pdfs are designed to be easily printed and should print as they are displayed on the screen. FREQUENTLY-ASKED QUESTIONS How does this website work? The maps, graphs and tables displayed on the website are created using the latest 250m MODIS fire scar maps sourced from Bushfires NT and Cape York Sustainable Futures. Once the web application has the fire scar map, it calculates the areas and percentages of different types of fire patterns etc. on the map and uses this information to produce the graphs and tables. How can I select areas that are not in the menus? At the moment you cannot select areas that are not in the menus, like catchments, unless you know the boundaries and hand-draw them, however, any frequently used regional boundaries that are available in digital form could be added to the area-selection drop-down menus so let us know what you need. Why is the report not available for areas further south? The reports are based on the 250m fire scar mapping which is generally not as reliable in areas further south in Queensland due to increased could cover and smaller fire size. In the Northern Territory the 250m fire scar mapping has only recently been extended south of 20 degrees and in Western Australia there is no fire scar mapping south of 20 degrees. 8
How accurate and precise are the results? Accuracy concerns how close a measured quantity is to its true value, whereas precision concerns the degree to which repeated measurements of the quantity produce the same results. The accuracy and precision of the maps, tables and graphs depend on various factors such as the type of data used and how frequently the data are updated. Type of data All map information has inherent inaccuracies and imprecision because of the way it is created. The fire histories, for example, are created from analysis of a satellite images assisted by pattern-matching software and this process has a limited resolution of around 250m. The topographic and line map information that shows locations of towns, rivers, roads etc. is usually mapped to a higher resolution which means that if you zoom the maps in, you can reach a point where you can still see clear locations of settlements, rivers and roads, but the fire scar maps look very blocky and coarse as shown below: This blockiness arises because we can see the edges of the individual pixels used to create the fire scar maps and at this level the accuracy of any individual pixel is not guaranteed, so in the small block in the centre of the map above, the fire scar map suggests it been burnt once in a particular pattern but this may not be the case as it is based on just a few pixels. So in this case the Fire Report could make a quite precise estimate of proportion of the block that has been burnt the result will probably be inaccurate. Consequently the NT Report tool cannot be used for any areas less than 100 squ. km. Location of selected area The accuracy of the fire scar mapping can vary with location, as some areas are more affected by cloud cover, landscape variation, tree cover and small fire size. Generally, the more heavily vegetated areas in eastern Queensland near the coast have less reliable fire scar mapping, with many cooler burns and smaller fires missed due to being obscured by clouds or the tree canopy. 9
Frequency of updating The data on the site can be inaccurate because it is out of date. The fire scar information is updated every year and can be clearly identified by its date, however, there can be problems with the underlying map information being out of date. For the Fire Report tool, the boundaries of the pastoral properties and parks and reserves are based on GeoScience Australia data from 2003 and the mapping itself may be older. So while the fire scars mapping will be updated each year, the boundaries used may become dated. The boundaries used will be updated regularly. 10