Great Western Woodlands Visual Fuel Hazard Assessment Across Time Since Fire Chronosequence Data
This data contains the visual assessment of fuel layers in fire-sensitive <em>Eucalyptus salubris</em> woodlands using Vesta methods across 24 sites in a multi-century (10 to 260+ years since fire) time-since-fire sequence derived from growth ring-size relationships.
Simple
Identification info
- Date (Creation)
- 2012-01-07
- Date (Publication)
- 2023-04-19
- Date (Revision)
- 2025-12-15
- Edition
- 1.0
Identifier
Publisher
Author
CSIRO Land and Water (2014-2022) - Gosper, Carl ()
147 Underwood Avenue, Floreat, 6014, Western Australia, Australia
Floreat
Western Australia
6014
Australia
Co-author
CSIRO Land and Water (2014-2022) - Prober, Suzanne Mary (Senior Principal Research Scientist)
147 Underwood Avenue, Floreat, 6014, Western Australia, Australia
Floreat
Western Australia
6014
Australia
Co-author
CSIRO Land and Water (2014-2022) - Yates, Colin ()
147 Underwood Avenue, Floreat, 6014, Western Australia, Australia
Floreat
Western Australia
6014
Australia
- Website
- https://www.tern.org.au/
- Purpose
- Understanding fire behaviour and vegetation flammability is important for predicting the consequences of fires. Visual assessments of fuel, such as those developed in Project Vesta, have been widely applied to facilitate rapid data acquisition to support fire behaviour models. However, the accuracy and potential wider application to other plant communities of Vesta visual fuel assessments has received limited attention. The Great Western Woodlands (GWW) region of south-western Australia supports the world’s largest remaining area of Mediterranean-climate woodland, which in mosaic with mallee, shrublands and salt lakes cover an area of 160 000 km2. Eucalyptus woodlands in this region are typically fire-sensitive, and fire return intervals recorded over recent decades have been much shorter than the long-term average. This has led to considerable conservation concern regarding the loss of mature woodlands, and has highlighted a need to better understand how fuel and vegetation flammability changes with time since fire.
- Credit
- We at TERN acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians throughout Australia, New Zealand and all nations. We honour their profound connections to land, water, biodiversity and culture and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
- Status
- Completed
Point of contact
CSIRO Land and Water (2014-2022) - Gosper, Carl ()
147 Underwood Avenue, Floreat, 6014, Western Australia, Australia
147 Underwood Avenue
Floreat
Western Australia
6014
Australia
- Topic category
-
- Biota
- Environment
Extent
- Description
- The Great Western Woodlands site was established in 2012 on Credo Station, 110 km NNW of Kalgoorlie, WA.
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W
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Temporal extent
- Time period
- 2012-01-07 2012-01-12
- Maintenance and update frequency
- Not planned
- GCMD Science Keywords
- ANZSRC Fields of Research
- TERN Platform Vocabulary
- TERN Instrument Vocabulary
- TERN Parameter Vocabulary
- QUDT Units of Measure
- GCMD Horizontal Resolution Ranges
- GCMD Temporal Resolution Ranges
- Keywords (Discipline)
-
- Ecological fire management
- Fire interval
- Project Vesta
- Space-for-time
- Vegetation structure
- GWW
- Great Western Woodlands
Resource constraints
- Use limitation
- The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license allows others to copy, distribute, display, and create derivative works provided that they credit the original source and any other nominated parties. Details are provided at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- File name
- 88x31.png
- File description
- CCBy Logo from creativecommons.org
- File type
- png
- Title
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence
- Alternate title
- CC-BY
- Edition
- 4.0
- Access constraints
- License
- Use constraints
- Other restrictions
- Other constraints
- TERN services are provided on an "as-is" and "as available" basis. Users use any TERN services at their discretion and risk. They will be solely responsible for any damage or loss whatsoever that results from such use including use of any data obtained through TERN and any analysis performed using the TERN infrastructure. <br />Web links to and from external, third party websites should not be construed as implying any relationships with and/or endorsement of the external site or its content by TERN. <br /><br />Please advise any work or publications that use this data via the online form at https://www.tern.org.au/research-publications/#reporting
- Other constraints
- Please cite this dataset as {Author} ({PublicationYear}). {Title}. {Version, as appropriate}. Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network. Dataset. {Identifier}.
- Other constraints
- Please note: This data has been migrated “as is” from TERN’s SuperSite data portal. Minimal quality assessment has been applied to this data. Please contact the dataset authors for queries regarding the data
Resource constraints
- Classification
- Unclassified
Distribution Information
- Distribution format
-
- NetCDF
Distributor
Distributor
- OnLine resource
- GWW_visual_fuel_hazard_assessment_data
Distribution Information
- Distribution format
-
- NetCDF
Distributor
Distributor
- OnLine resource
- GWW_visual_fuel_hazard_assessment_data_dictionary
Distribution Information
- Distribution format
-
Distributor
Distributor
Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
Building 1019, 80 Meiers Rd, Indooroopilly, QLD, Australia, 4068
Indooroopilly
QLD
4068
Australia
- OnLine resource
- ro-crate-metadata.json
Resource lineage
- Statement
- Following the methodology of Project Vesta (Gould JS, McCaw WL, Cheney NP, Ellis PF, Knight IK, Sullivan AL (2007a) ‘Project Vesta – Fire in dry Eucalypt forest: fuel structure, fuel dynamics and fire behaviour.’ (Ensis-CSIRO: Canberra and Department of Environment and Conservation: Perth)), ~300 m long transects were established passing through a 24 plots in fire-sensitive <em>Eucalyptus salubris</em> woodlands. At ~30 m intervals, sampling points were established (n = 10 per site) and visual assessment of the height or depth, percentage cover score (PCS) and fuel hazard score (FHS) for Surface, Near-surface, Elevated, Intermediate (within a 5 m radius of the sample point) and Canopy (within 10 m of the sample point) fuel layers. PCS and FHS numerically characterise the fuel layers through visually estimated categorical scores over the range from 0 to 5. Further information on delineation of vegetation layers and scoring PCS and FHS can be found in Gould et al. 2007a (Gould JS, McCaw WL, Cheney NP, Ellis PF, Knight IK, Sullivan AL (2007a) ‘Project Vesta – Fire in dry Eucalypt forest: fuel structure, fuel dynamics and fire behaviour.’ (Ensis-CSIRO: Canberra and Department of Environment and Conservation: Perth) and Gosper et al. 2014 (Gosper CR, Yates CJ, Prober SM and Wiehl G (2014) Application and validation of visual fuel hazard assessments in dry Mediterranean-climate woodlands. International Journal of Wildland Fire 23, 385-393). Vegetation layer heights over 4 m were measured using a hypsometer (Nikon Forestry 550). Following a trial assessment, some tailoring of the Vesta assessment protocols to the study community was required: namely litter depth was assessed in the discrete patches of litter, rather than averaged across the whole Surface layer which often had large areas with no litter cover; and fuel layers consisting solely of fire-killed vegetation or rare, emergent <em>Eucalyptus salmonophloia</em> (which sometimes survive fires) were recorded separately from other vegetation layers and are excluded from the data contained here. Following Gould et al. 2007b (Gould JS, McCaw WL, Cheney NP, Ellis PF, Matthews S (2007b) ‘Field guide – Fuel assessment and fire behaviour prediction in dry eucalypt forest.’ (Ensis-CSIRO: Canberra and Department of Environment and Conservation: Perth)), the mean of the 10 values per site was taken.
- Hierarchy level
- Dataset
- Title
- Gould JS, McCaw WL, Cheney NP, Ellis PF, Knight IK, Sullivan AL (2007a) ‘Project Vesta – Fire in dry Eucalypt forest: fuel structure, fuel dynamics and fire behaviour.’ (Ensis-CSIRO: Canberra and Department of Environment and Conservation: Perth)
- Website
-
https://www.publish.csiro.au/book/5993/
Method documentation
Reference System Information
- Reference system identifier
- EPSG/EPSG:4326
- Reference system type
- Geodetic Geographic 2D
Metadata
- Metadata identifier
-
urn:uuid/edcbd9fb-6c8c-41e5-bff6-15002d3389bc
- Title
- TERN GeoNetwork UUID
- Language
- English
- Character encoding
- UTF8
Point of contact
Type of resource
- Resource scope
- Dataset
- Metadata linkage
-
https://geonetwork.tern.org.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/edcbd9fb-6c8c-41e5-bff6-15002d3389bc
Point-of-truth metadata URL
- Date info (Creation)
- 2023-04-19T00:00:00.000000+00:00
- Date info (Revision)
- 2025-12-15T04:58:22.057681+00:00
Metadata standard
- Title
- ISO 19115-1:2014/AMD 1:2018 Geographic information - Metadata - Fundamentals
- Edition
- 1
Metadata standard
- Title
- ISO/TS 19115-3:2016
- Edition
- 1.0
Metadata standard
- Title
- ISO/TS 19157-2:2016
- Edition
- 1.0
- Title
- Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) Metadata Profile of ISO 19115-3:2016 and ISO 19157-2:2016
- Date (published)
- 2021
- Edition
- 1.0
Identifier
Overviews
Spatial extent
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W
Provided by
Associated resources
Not available