Estimating fuel moisture and fire history from Sentinel 2 satellite imagery

The Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES), the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (DBCA), the Australian National University (ANU) and Murdoch University have a project entitled “Quantifying seasonal variation in live fuel moisture content, fuel dynamics and the effects of the mosaic of prescribed burning on fire behaviour in near-urban coastal vegetation mosaic”

Fuel moisture is a key factor affecting the flammability, fire behaviour, damage potential and suppression difficulty of bushfires, and it is an input to fire danger rating and fie behaviour prediction systems.

While there are well-developed models that predict the moisture content of dead fuels such as cured grass and forest litter, no models or methods exist for predicting or effectively measuring the moisture content of predominately live fuels, such as the shrublands of SW-WA.

Within this larger project, Landgate, with the above partners have been working on a sub-project to provide DFES and DBCA with Sentinel 2 satellite imagery derived datasets, aiming to provide an improved capability to understand changes in fuel moisture within the coastal shrubland region, along with a detailed fire history spanning  2016 to June 2021.