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: https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/forests-of-australia-2018,
and forest tenure information sourced from the Tenure of Australia’s
Forests (2018) dataset: https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/tenure-of-australia-s-forests-2018
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 Fires 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.
This dataset is provided as part of the five-yearly Australia's State of the Forests Report Series. Further information can be found on the Forests Australia website: http://www.agriculture.gov.au/abares/forestsaustralia/sofr/sofr-2018