2020 National Operational Bushfire Boundaries

This spatial product was built in direct response to the public's, industry's and governments demand/requirement for a National Bushfire Boundary layer during and after the 2020 Black Summer Bushfires.

Emergency Management Spatial information Network Australia (EMSINA) members (National and the Developers) begun developing this consolidated National Bushfire Boundary Webservice on December 30, 2019. With the technical assistance of Esri Australia the first public facing product (v1) became available on January 8, 2020. Geoscience Australia staff were involved in the development and maintenance of the FME scripts.

Version 2 of the product was released in February as EMSINA and Geoscience Australia began automating the product. This release exhibited a reformatted attributed table to accommodate the new automation scripts; unfortunately this release resulted in having to release the data with new access end points.

The product was continuously developed until early May 2020. On May 4, 2020 the EMSINA Committee made the decision to stop running the script i.e. 1 month after the official end of the bushfire season.

The product and the scripting were subsequently archived on both EMSINA and GA infrastructure. The National Bushfire Recovery Agency was provided a copy of the automation scripts on May 7, 2020 and then on June 26, 2020 a complete copy of the data from January 8, 2020 to May 4, 2020 in a geodatabase format. 

The EMSINA Group formally ended their technical involvement with this project on June 30, 2020.

The Emergency Management LINK (EM-LINK*) catalogue was the source for identifying the majority of the required data. The consolidated National Bushfire Boundary Webservice contains data from:

 Australian Capital Territory - Emergency Service Agency (ESA)

 New South Wales - Rural Fire Service (RFS)

 Queensland - Queensland Fire and Emergency Service (QFES)

 Queensland - Queensland Department of Environment and Science (DES)

 South Australia - Country Fire Service (CFS)

 Tasmania - Tasmania Fire Service (TFS)

 Victoria - Emergency Management Victoria (EMV)


Where EMSINA and/or Geoscience Australia had difficulty in accessing the required spatial data and/or attributes assistance was provided by the National Bushfire Recovery Agency and Emergency Management Australia.

Known Limitations of the Data:

This database does not contain information from Western Australia. Neither EMSINA nor the Australian Government were able to negotiate appropriate access to the State’s operational boundary data.

EMSINA is aware of duplicate data (features) contained within this database. This duplicate data is commonly represented in the regions around state lines where it became operationally necessary to understand cross border situations. Care must be taken when summing the values to obtain a total area burnt. 

EMSINA and Geoscience Australia became aware of the following error in the database in April 2020:

- Upon receipt of the Queensland data it was mistakenly assessed as Operational Boundaries and not as Historic FY Boundaries. This data was included into the database until the mistake was discovered in early April.

The data within this aggregated National product is a representation of the input data received from the custodian agencies. Therefore, to assess the quality or find out more information about an individual feature or features it is recommend that you contact the appropriate custodian.


Tags: Australia, Boundaries, black summer, boundaries, boundary, bushfire, scars, wildfire
Organization: National Recovery and Resilience Agency