Fires in Australia's forests 2011–16 (2018)

Publication date: 16 February 2019

Fires in Australia’s Forests 2011–16 (2018) is a continental spatial dataset of the extent and frequency of planned and unplanned fires occurring in forest in the five financial years between July 2011 and June 2016, assembled for Australia's State of the Forests Report 2018. It was developed from multiple fire area datasets contributed by state and territory government agencies, after consultation with Australia’s Forest Fire Management Group. The fire dataset is then combined with forest cover information sourced from the Forests of Australia (2018) dataset, and forest tenure information sourced from the Tenure of Australia’s Forests (2018) dataset.

The dataset was compiled by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) for the National Forest Inventory (NFI), a collaborative partnership between the Australian and state and territory governments. The role of the NFI is to collate, integrate and communicate information on Australia's forests. The NFI applies a national classification to state and territory data to allow seamless integration of these datasets. Multiple independent sources of external data are used to fill data gaps and improve the quality of the final dataset.

Forest areas burnt by fire are allocated by the month of the fire to a financial year (July–June inclusive). Where more than one fire event occurs on any one hectare during a financial year, only the first fire is recorded for that area in the financial year. Fires are also classified into two categories, planned and unplanned, based on the fire seasonality and advice from state and territory agencies.

The Fire in Australia’s forests 2011–16 (2018) dataset is produced to fulfil requirements of Australia's National Forest Policy Statement and the Regional Forests Agreement Act 2002 (Cwth), and is used by the Australian Government for domestic and international reporting.