Mapping Burnt Areas in NSW

This project aims to map burnt areas within NSW in a way that is useful for bushwalkers. When vegetation is burnt in a bushfire, it generally removes scrub and makes the area easier to travel through for a few years. Knowing where these recently burnt areas are can then assist in route planning for bushwalks.

• Obtain knowledge for bushfire occurrence - both time and location
  • RFS Fires Near Me will detail any active fires, with either a point or rough polygon indicating its position
  • Looking through old imagery can also lead to burn area identification
• Capture imagery of burn area
  • Best done with EOS Land Viewer
    • Free service (with some restrictions), account required
    • Provides Landsat and Sentinal imagery (only Landsat 8 and Sentinal-2 are of interest)
    • Limit of 10 'scenes' per day - these are the big tiles of satellite imagery
    • Unlimited downloads of 'scene' data, but resolution reduced to <10mb file
    • Provides individual bands, including IR and NIR, along with pre-set band combinations - use Shortwave Infrared
  • An alternative is the USGS LandLook
    • Free service, no account required
    • Also has Landsat and Sentinal imagery
    • Unlimited image views and downloads (need to select geotiff format and geographic spatial reference)
    • Only provides true-colour images, no use of IR or NIR bands
• Create burn extent polygons
  • Load imagery into QGIS and name file as layer in format of “[yyyy-mm-dd of capture] [Area]” for reference
  • Add polygon by visually inspecting burn area image and capturing full extent within boundary
  • Add field data to polygon such as fire name, area, date of image capture

An example can be found through the link below, where a geojson file has been imported into an online map. Burnt Areas Map - 20181113

• Investigate RFS RSS Feed data
  • It appears that they supply multiple feeds relating to fires
  • Their Current Incidents Feed (GeoJSON) feed appears to be a geojson file of all current fires, which includes points or polygons
  • See if it's worth collecting this data on a regular basis (say weekly) and then compiling into one big database for reference and / or later analysis