How EcoRes was actually run.

EcoRes is a modelling study. It does not measure what happens to real Victorian landscapes — it simulates what would happen, under each of nine fuel-management strategies, across five case-study regions, under four climate models. Every finding on this site is a quantity drawn from those simulations.

The simulation pipeline pairs two models: FROST for fire behaviour and weather-driven spread, and FAME for vegetation, growth-stage structure, and species response. A run is one combination of {scenario × region × climate model} iterated forward over the simulation horizon.

FROST (Fire Regime Operations and Simulations Tool) brings together sub-models for weather, ignition, fuel state, suppression and fuel management, which feed the core fire-behaviour model PHOENIX Rapidfire. It produces fire footprints — what burnt, where, when, and at what severity — for each year from 2024 to 2099. FROST is built and maintained by the FLARE Wildfire Research Group.

FAME (Fire Analysis Module for Ecological values) consumes those footprints with the vegetation map and produces the ecological response: TFI compliance, growth-stage structure by Ecological Fire Group (EFG), and relative abundance for 38 fauna species. FAME is maintained by the Arthur Rylah Institute.

Each combination is run over 75 years and averaged across 50 replicates. Fire and asset outcomes are reported relative to the suppression-only (SO) baseline; species abundance is reported against 2024 starting conditions (= 1.0).

One baseline (SO) plus four archetypes — JFMP, EPZ, PRB and SS. Each is also run as a variant: JFMP at an elevated rate (JFMP_E), and EPZ, PRB and SS overlaid on current DEECA zoning (the _JFMP variants) — nine scenarios in all. The full taxonomy with descriptions lives on step 3; the strategy-vs-outcome scorecard lives on step 5.

Naming. The same scenario appears under three names across report, database and Shiny apps. This site uses one plain set — SO · JFMP · JFMP_E · EPZ · PRB · SS — with _JFMP as the with-current-zoning suffix. See the alias table on step 3.

The five regions span the regime types DEECA manages — fuel-limited landscapes where burning bites hard, climate-limited landscapes where weather dominates, and one mixed case that flips with the year. Findings reported as Victoria-wide are weighted averages across the five.

FROST draws daily and half-hourly weather from the NARCLIM 1.5 regional projections. Four downscaled models were used to span the plausible range — all following RCP8.5, the high-emissions pathway — over the full 75 years, 2024–2099.

Each finding (4a–4f) reports a subset of these. The scorecard on step 5 compresses them all into ++ / + / — / − / −−.

Knowing what the modelling does not capture is as important as knowing what it does. The four caveats below frame how findings should be used in operational planning.

The Shiny apps linked from the findings on step 4 pull from the same database that produced the report. Aggregated outputs by scenario × study area × metric are available on request; raw FROST + FAME outputs are larger and supplied by arrangement. For access or datasets, email fire.ecology.support@deeca.vic.gov.au.