TERN's Associate Professor Nikki Thurgate's presentation at Bushfire16 on TERN's data infrastructure that enabling fire research and management.

1. TERN: Data infrastructure that
enables fire management
Nikki Thurgate, S. Guru and T. Clancy

2. TERN:
• Infrastructure and networks to support a coordinated, collaborative
ecosystem science community
• Enabling sustained, long-term collection, storage, synthesis and
sharing of ecosystem data
• Connecting science with policy and management
TERN: Australia’s ecosystem observatory delivering data
streams to enable environmental research and
management

3. Instruments
+ Sensors
Policy +
Management
Analysis
+ Synthesis
Modelling
Data
Searching
Data
Sharing
Data Curation
+ Publishing
Data
Storage
Processing
+ Analysis
Collection
Methods

4. TERN FIRE DATA- TASMANIA 2016-
COMBINATION OF METHODS ALLOWS
IMPROVED BUSHFIRE PREDICTION MODELS
Connecting science

5. TERN Fire data- Repeated fuel reduction burns in
temperate forests, like this one in
southeast Australia, have little long-term
impact on soil greenhouse gas exchange

6. Fire Management
Pre-processed MODIS fire
burnt area satellite
imagery
Vegetation Map and
Expert elicitation

7. Thank you
Carl Gosper, Suzanne Prober and Colin Yates
t (08) 9333 6442
e carl.gosper@csiro.au
CSIRO ECOSYSTEM SCIENCES AND DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENT & CONSERVATION
Further information:
Parsons & Gosper (2011) International Journal of Wildland Fire 20, 184-194
Prober et al. (2012) Climatic Change 110, 227-248
Gosper et al. (in press) Australian Journal of Botany doi: 10.1071/BT12212

8. Age-structure in GWW woodlands
Age class (years since fire)
Percentageofwoodlandarea
0
20
40
60
80
Satellite image analysis
0-60 61+
• Understanding the age structure of GWW woodlands could provide
clues as to whether recent levels of woodland fire are unprecedented
• To provide a crude assessment of the age structure of woodlands
across the GWW, we extrapolated the results from gimlet woodlands
and landsat fire mapping to the regional scale, by assuming that the
distribution in age classes older than 60 years is proportional to
random samples from E. salubris woodlands
Area mapped for
fire age
GWW boundary

9. Square-root (years since fire)
0 5 10 15 20 25
ShannonDiversity
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
3.5
4.0
y = 3.313 - 0.194x + 0.011x2
Adj. r2
= 0.304, F2,69 = 16.5, P < 0.0001
•globally rare ‘U’-shaped
relationship between diversity
and time since fire is likely to be
driven by dominant trees and
shrubs having maximum
competitive influence at
intermediate times since fire
Results (1):
Young Mature
Intermediate
•graph shows linear model for
stand age

10. Management implications
• As diversity was highest in mature woodlands,
there is no support for gimlet woodlands
requiring recurrent fire to maintain plant
diversity, at least within 400+ year timeframes
• Intense stand-replacing fires at intervals of <
200 yrs would have adverse implications for
biodiversity conservation. Species diversity
would not increase to the community
maximum
Multi-century changes in plant diversity

11. International Partners
TERN is supported by the Australian Government through
the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy

12. www.tern.org.au
More information?