Description
The current Indonesian Fire Danger Rating System (FDRS) is used at the provincial level and national level, but it is too coarse and uses a minimal set of information (mainly based on weather) to be effectively used at a finer scale (i.e. at sub-district and/or village level). The Gambut Kita project will produce a more usable and accurate Peat Fire Danger Rating System (PFDRS), which will be designed to ‘bolt’ onto Indonesia’s existing FDRS. It will provide more accurate measurements on fine fuels and incorporate better understanding of diurnal changes in peat moisture in the surface layers. The PFDRS will improve the ability of local governments to provide data to their sub-districts on aspects of peat fire danger. Currently, the ability of local governments to provide peat fire information is limited to surface fires, and based on weather data from a very small number of weather stations
Description
The Peat Fire Monitoring Field Training (PFMFT) is based on a methodology developed by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES)–Bogor Agricultural University (Institut Pertanian Bogor, IPB) National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Peat Fire Research Project. It provides a detailed approach to monitoring fire activity in the field through conducting a “Fire Scene Evaluation” and which includes collecting data on “Peat Fire Behaviour”. Data collection comprises: location and access points to the fire; total area burned; fuel loads; land tenure, usage and access rights; fire ignition and control (motivations, causes, human actions, [economic] loss of assets/ infrastructure, response [suppression]); authorities involved; scientific data (surface and peat emissions); and peat-fire behaviour. Past training events generated a high degree of interest in this approach from the project researchers and Indonesian academics, as well as on-ground fire fighters and those managing these teams, who wish to have a means of describing and quantifying the fires they observe.