Clearing vegetation close to houses is the best way to reduce the impacts of severe bushfires, according to a team of scientists from Australia and the USA who examined house loss as a result of Black Saturday. The research involving 12,000 measurements at 500 houses affected by the Black Saturday fires was only made possible by the sheer size of the devastation of February 7, 2009.
Dr Philip Gibbons, Prof David Lindenmayer, Australian National University
PLoS ONE; http://news.anu.edu.au/?p=13431