When asked about their use of bushfire maps during the 2019-2020 fire season, a participant from New South Wales recalled:
“Yeah, we were kind of living off them really. You’d see something or you’d go around to a neighbour’s place and see it from a different angle, and you’d go and check the app again, just trying to get our heads around exactly what was happening – we were really living off it. It was used more – those apps were used more than the phone feature on the phone over those days.”
Maps are an important way to communicate information and are increasingly distributed and used in natural hazards, like bushfires. The use of maps, and in particular, fire spread prediction maps that display the likely spread of fire over time, have become an important topic of interest for fire and emergency services agencies across Australia.
This part of the Predictions in Public: Understanding the design, communication and dissemination of predictive maps to the public project turned to the public to explore how community members understood, used and acted on maps during bushfire emergencies, including incident and fire spread prediction maps.
Hazard Note 5: Community comprehension, perception and use of maps during bushfires, authored by Dr Erica Kuligowski, RMIT University, summarises this research and presents new critical insights into the public’s needs to understand and act on bushfire predictive and incident maps.
The study’s findings will be presented in the September Hazardous Webinar, which will take place 11.00am - 12.00pm AEST, 17 September 2024.
The broader Predictions in Public: Understanding the design, communication and dissemination of predictive maps to the public project aims to use empirical evidence and collaborative processes to contribute to and support a national approach to the future use of public-facing predictive fire spread products during an emergency. The project is a collaboration between Natural Hazards Research Australia, Country Fire Authority Victoria, Victorian Department of Education, RMIT University, Queensland University of Technology, Deakin University and Swinburne University of Technology.
Phase 1 of the project assessed the understanding and use of bushfire maps among fire agencies and the public and is now complete. Subsequent phases will develop principles for the standardised use of predictive maps within the Australian Warning System, as well as the development of practical outputs to ensure the use of the project’s findings in the design of future bushfire and predictive maps.
Findings from the national community survey component of the Predictions in Public project will be presented in the July Hazardous Webinar, Understanding of how community members comprehend and use bushfire maps.
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