With a big landscape, a limited budget and a diverse set of community objectives, how do we decide where, when and how fuel treatments are best undertaken to reduce wildfire risks?

Decision makers have a set of options – conduct a prescribed burn, mechanically reduce the fuel, introduce grazing, or use a herbicide. When deciding between these possible fuel treatment plans, each option, or combination of options, must be considered so that community objectives for risk reduction can be achieved with the resources available.

This decision point is the focus of a PhD study by Douglas Radford, from Adelaide University, in his article “Optimising fuel treatment plans to reduce burn probability: the importance of navigating context, priorities and trade-offs” in the International Journal of Wildland Fire.

Joint winner of the Best Student Paper 2025 in the International Journal of Wildland Fire. Read the full paper.

Read about the other Joint winner here

Radford explains that his work applies multi-objective optimisation to support decision-making for bushfire risk reduction – that is, where and how should we use prescribed burning to reduce risk? The optimisation approach was able to find solutions that improved the effectiveness of fuel treatment plans significantly (80 – 280% improvement).

“An important message here is that what makes a “good” decision will depend highly on how we collectively understand and define what our objectives are, and on how we navigate any trade-offs between those objectives,” Radford said.

“While optimisation and other “tech-based” approaches can help us to explore good decisions, the process of working alongside our communities to define what “good” looks like is values-based and cannot be out-sourced.”

Radford applied his case study to the Adelaide Hills of South Australia. By using a state of the art computational “metamodel” the study was able to run thousands of possible fuel treatments across a large area.

“My PhD project aimed to improve decision-support for land and fire management agencies. Further research will make this work more reflective of the multi-dimensional nature of fire its roles and the values of our communities.”

Radford is confident his algorithms are flexible and can be adapted to a wide range of objectives and constraints and therefore, can be used beyond South Australia.

“These approaches can be tailored to unique communities – human and environmental – in all sorts of contexts.

“We have started applying these tools in New South Wales and following a chance meeting at the IAWF Fire Behaviour and Fuels conference in Hobart this year, we’ve started exploring their applications in Canada too. I’m excited to see where we can go next!”

Radford’s study “Optimising fuel treatment plans to reduce burn probability: the importance of navigating context, priorities and trade-offs” was judged joint winner of the Best Student Paper 2025 in the International Journal of Wildland Fire.

Read about the other Joint Winner here