Large-scale burning off does little to prevent bushfires and could indirectly increase the likelihood of homes being lost in the next fire season, research has found.
States and territories funding big burns would be better off directing resources to burning off closer to homes, Professor David Lindenmayer, a world-leading expert in forest ecology and resource management says.
The recent study found while forests were unlikely to burn for a short period after burning off, they were more likely to burn during the regrowth period, when the understorey became taller and denser.
Professor Lindenmayer, an Australian National University academic, said the notion of doing very large-scale burns in remote parts of Namadgi or the Brindabellas was fundamentally wrong.
He said large-scale burning was often in response to a recommendation, as in Victoria, which responded to the bushfire royal commission by committing to burning 5 per cent of the state.
Professor Lindenmayer said the only way to hit an area target like that was to burn very remote areas, nowhere near people's property.
"That's actually a perverse outcome," he said.
"There's a deep culture in this whole industry of prescribed burning and there's a need to bring a lot more science into it." In collaboration with ACT Parks and Conservation Service and the ACT Rural Fire Service, ANU is undertaking research to develop a national system to detect bushfires as soon as they start and extinguish them within minutes.
The work aims to increase capacity to identify which lightning strikes will most likely start a fire, develop the technology to detect small fires and identify where fire will spread most quickly.
The team has already developed a prototype for an unmanned vehicle that would be deployed to rapidly extinguish the flames.
The GPS-guided water gliders bomb are accurate from high-altitudes, unlike current techniques for aerial firefighting, which limit the speed of the response, researchers say.
"What we're talking about is an integrated system that uses lightning strike modeling, rapid detection, rapid suppression and prioritisation to help tackle these problems," he said.
"We know from new work just published that the prescribed burning process can actually stimulate the growth of understorey vegetation afterwards, so it naturally regenerates after those disturbances and that can make the system more fire prone for about 40 or 50 years.
"We need to be focusing our prescribed burning where it matters, which is close to people who are close to property.
"We need to use our new technologies to detect fire in the more remote parts of the ACT and extinguish those fires quickly.
"We need to abandon this idea that we need to do very large scale industrial scale prescribed burns in very remote parts of the ACT.
"I think that's going to be counterproductive and I think it's a poor use of public funds."
