Teaching Sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

10 minutes	Part A: How do bushfires start?
15 minutes	Part B: Way of monitoring for bushfire indicators
25 minutes	Part C: Design your own fire shield
05 minutes	Reflection

Part A: How do bushfires start?

Step 1.

Watch:

The Four Friends of Fire (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo1DsSarYdE)

Step 2.

Can students name some things that might be used as an ignition source?

Often this is lightning strikes out in the wilderness, striking very dry fuel sources of brush, grasses, and trees.

Sometimes it can be an arsonist, a person with a box of matches or similar. But we’re not going to try and predict why these people decide to light fires.

Step 3.

Discuss: How could we use this knowledge to help us predict where the next bushfire might occur in Australia?

Lead students to the understanding that areas with a lot of fuel, in this case the wild outback, and parts of Australia that are very hot, are more likely to experience bushfires.

You might also like to mention that after droughts, which are the result of sustained periods of hot weather, the bush dries out considerably, creating a lot of very flammable tinder for fires to consume.

Of course, there is also always the potential for lightning strikes, accidents involving live wires, farming equipment or cars, as well as the risk of people deliberately starting fires, leading to the beginnings of a bushfire.

Part B: Ways of monitoring for bushfire indicators

You can find an interactive version of all the maps below at MyFireWatch. It might be easier to use the website yourself, or to use the images supplied.

Step 1.

In this Part, we are going to look over some maps to see if they tell us anything about the likelihood of a fire occurring.

Let’s start with this map (all of these maps are available for viewing on the PowerPoint):

This map indicates where there is vegetation all across Australia.

Does this change where students think there could be a bushfire? Why?

Step 2.

Compare to this map:

The grey areas indicate areas that have been burnt over the past two years (as of March 2022).

Does this change where students think there could be a bushfire? Why?

Areas that have burned recently are unlikely to have a lot of fuel available for a second fire - although it is not impossible that they will burn again.

Step 3.

Explain to students that we’re going to go back in time a little bit now and look at some maps from the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) from 2019. Why? Because from the 5th of September 2019 to the 2nd of March 2020 Australia experienced nationwide bushfire events known as Black Summer.

So, we’re looking for anything that might have helped us predict that these bushfires were going to happen.

Step 4.

Show students this map of the average rainfall in Australia (note the dates):

It’s a little bit hard to make out the difference between all the red, but we can see that almost all of Australia experienced below, to very much below, to the lowest rainfall on record over this period.

That means the bush was very, very dry.

Step 5.

Show students this map of the average temperature in Australia.

Again, note the dates.

This map shows us that some parts of Australia recorded the highest temperatures in history, while all of Australia was above or very much above the average temperature. In fact, the BoM reports that 2019 was on course to be the second or third warmest year on record across the entire world. The last four years (2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018) were the four warmest years on record. This means that we had almost 5 years of the hottest weather ever.

So, we had lots of fuel growing, which was very dry, and some very hot conditions, with hardly any rain. Ultimately, this led to some of the worst bushfires in Australia’s history, all across the country.

Even knowing the conditions were perfect for these kinds of bushfires, we still have to sound the alarm when a bushfire started. One of the ways we currently do this is, simply, with our eyes. We send someone up a watchtower, and they look out for fires.

NOTE: We can also work to mitigate some of these conditions and thereby make our communities more resilient to bushfires by being prepared for them. To explore some fire mitigation strategies, check out our lesson on What can we do for our environment to make it more resilient?

However, a 2012 CSIRO experiment found an observer in a tower took about 30 minutes from the ignition of a fire to actually noticing the fire and sounding the alarm.

In remote places without observers, or at night, fires can burn for hours before they're reported. Fires in remote places are often started by lightning strikes, as they were in 2019-20, and we miss small fires starting, allowing them to become big fires.

Fanned by wind, a new fire can spread at astonishing speeds. A CSIRO study estimated this at 1,500 square metres every 10 minutes.

NOTE: To learn more about how a fire spreads and how this can help us be resilient by preparing for bushfires, check out this lesson on How do fires behave?

This means we sometimes don’t know about a fire until it is a massive challenge to stop.

This leads us back to our original question:

Discuss:

How could we better monitor the bush in order to predict where/when a bushfire might be about to start?

Part C: Design your own fire shield

Step 1.

Students could explore these for inspiration for designing their own method of detecting fires.

AI Cameras

Sentinel Hotspots

Step 2.

Independently, students designed their own method of detecting fires.

The method can be as creative as students can imagine, but the theory behind them has to be informed by what they’ve learned in this lesson. That is, they have to design something that can either;

measure dryness (rainfall);
measure fuel loads (vegetation), or;
measure hotspots.

Some ideas to kickstart your thinking:

Some sort of car or plane that goes around the outback and tests the density of the bush somehow
A satellite that observes Australia from space and prints out images of hot areas
A thermometer with an attached alarm
An observer tower, but manned by robots with thermal vision
Attaching GPS trackers to animals that flee at the first signs of smoke/fire

NOTE: We are just looking to detect fires at this point. For innovative ways to put out fires, check out our lesson How can we use technology to fight bushfires?

Step 3.

Students should draw a picture of their invention and write a few paragraphs explaining how their invention detects conditions that predict bushfires and warns humans based on what they have learned in this lesson.

Step 4.

Finally, give students a blank map of Australia.

Direct them to https://myfirewatch.landgate.wa.gov.au/map.html, which shows the current vegetation and hotspots across Australia from satellite imaging.

Give students some time to play around with the different filters on the left hand side of the screen.

Step 5.

On their map, students are to fill in

Current hotspots (yellow)
Current vegetation coverage (green)
Areas burnt in the past two years (grey)
Where they think fires are most likely to occur in the immediate future (can mark with a red X, or colour these areas red.)

Students should consider this map a piece of data that they might feed to your invention like an AI, so that it will learn how to better predict fire locations, or the areas it should be checking.

Reflection

Invite students to share their idea for a Fire Shield Automated Detection Unit.

Exit Ticket - Before moving to their next class or an outside break, students purchase their 'exit' with a 'ticket' that demonstrates their understanding of the learning undertaken in this lesson.

You can have students write their responses on a sticky note along with their name, or you can have them line up and verbally communicate their understanding to you at the door as they leave.

Ask students for one predictor of a bushfire event. Answers might include:

High fuel loads
Dry conditions/low rainfall
Extreme and sustained periods of hot weather (heat)

Teacher reflection

Take this opportunity to reflect on your own teaching

What did you learn about your teaching today?
What worked well?
What didn’t work so well?
What would you share?
Where to next?
How are you going to get there?

Resilient Australia - How can we better predict fires?

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