NOBURN Citizen Science
The NatiOnal BUshfire Resilience Network (NOBURN) is the first of its kind citizen science project involving Australian communities in data collection and predictive modelling of bushfires, garnering interest in the science behind bushfires and creating awareness of the fire-susceptibility of our forests.
Get Involved !
Exciting News! The new NOBURN website is LIVE! 
Check it out here: https://noburn.app/about
Explore the project, meet the team members, and don’t forget to download the app!
With bushfire season in Australia, it’s crucial to be prepared. One simple way YOU can make a difference is by joining us in the ‘Snap a pic, help predict’ initiative!
Download the App
Snap a pic on your smartphone in the forest/bush
Let AI and our research team do the rest!
What NOBURN does:
It lets us assess fire risk from citizen photo uploads and descriptions.
Your information helps us understand forest fuels’ structure, quantity, density, and dryness.
With AI, we predict fire likelihood, severity, and extent more accurately.
Images are time-stamped and geo-referenced, aiding bushfire research.
What is NOBURN?
In the 2019-20 fire season, over 10 million hectares of forest burnt and over 2000 homes were destroyed. The cost to Australia was estimated to run into the billions and has had a devastating impact on the agriculture, forestry and tourism industries.
There are very limited resources currently available to support accurate prediction and effective response to large-scale fire events. For bushfire researchers, it is very difficult to collect continuous data on the susceptibility of forests to fire across Australia.
This citizen science project involves the design and development of NOBURN, which stands for ‘National Bushfire Resilience Network’. NOBURN is a data-collection tool to capture evidence of fire-susceptibility of our forests by citizen scientists, hikers, foresters, schools and the community and provides information on the flammability of forests based on their structure, quantity, density and dryness of forest fuels. As a result of data and images recorded through the app by its users and citizen scientists, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will predict the probability, severity and burn area of potential bushfires by finding patterns between forest fuels, satellite images, elevation and weather data based on historic fire events.
Every day of the year across the country, people are in the forest for work, recreation, or just live there. And so, it is of the greatest benefit to those people to protect their environment and warn them in case catastrophic bushfires would occur. NOBURN will do exactly that and assist with national disaster resilience, preparedness and response to bushfires.
For more information Contact Sam Van Holsbeeck
Email noburn@usc.edu.au