Fire Severity Map of Major 2019/20 Gippsland and Northeast Victoria Fires

Fire severity classification of bushfires impacting approximately 1.5 million hectares of predominantly forested public land in eastern and north-eastern Victoria and southern New South Wales between November 2019 and March 2020. The Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action produced this map using a machine learning classification of Sentinel 2 satellite imagery, trained on high-resolution aerial imagery from the 2018/19 season. The data provides six severity classes for woody vegetation, with an estimated overall model accuracy of 85%.

Use Cases

• Assessing initial post-fire environmental risk based on canopy and understorey severity classes.
• Informing emergency stabilisation and recovery efforts on public land as per the Code of Practice for Bushfire Management.
• Training or validating remote sensing models for fire severity using the described machine learning methodology.
• Analyzing the spatial distribution of fire impacts across forested landcover types.

Strengths

• Covers a large spatial area of approximately 1.5 million hectares.
• Model has an estimated overall accuracy of 85% (0.81 Kappa).
• Classification methodology is documented in referenced research (Collins et al., 2018).
• Provides six distinct severity classes for detailed landscape assessment.

Limitations

• A ground-based validation of the classification has not been undertaken.
• The classification is limited to woody vegetation landcover types.
• Producer accuracy varies by class, with Medium Canopy Scorch (MCS) at 61%.

Provenance

Source

Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (Victoria)

Collection Method

Machine learning classification (Random forests) of pre- and post-fire Sentinel 2 satellite imagery, trained on high-resolution aerial imagery.

Time Range

November 2019 to March 2020

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-27 18:18:25.426296; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Eastern and north-eastern Victoria, Australia, and parts of southern New South Wales