Buttongrass moorlands are widespread in western Tasmania. In these moorlands, the ability to conduct burning without having to rely on hard fuel boundaries (e.g. vegetation which is too wet to burn, water courses, mineral earth breaks and/or roads) would be a major advantage to land managers. Such burning relies on fires self-extinguishing and is normally referred to as unbounded burning. The aim of this project was to model the probability of fires extinguishing using the data from 156 buttongrass moorland fires. The variables used were wind speed, dead fuel moisture and site productivity. The model, derived from a combination of logistic regression and classification tree modelling, predicts that fires will self-extinguish over a wide range of conditions in low productivity moorlands but, in medium productivity moorlands, the conditions within which fires will self-extinguish will be much more restrictive. As a result, the technique of unbounded burning should be widely applicable in low productivity moorlands, but will be of marginal utility in medium productivity moorlands.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Research Division:	Environmental Sciences
Research Group:	Environmental management
Research Field:	Conservation and biodiversity
Objective Division:	Environmental Management
Objective Group:	Terrestrial systems and management
Objective Field:	Rehabilitation or conservation of terrestrial environments
UTAS Author:	Marsden-Smedley, JB (Dr Jonathan Marsden-Smedley)
ID Code:	22394
Year Published:	2001
Web of Science® Times Cited:	32
Deposited By:	Geography and Environmental Studies
Deposited On:	2001-08-01
Last Modified:	2002-05-09
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