Fire management in northern Australia has been markedly changed by the use of satellite based information describing the timing, extent and effect of fire on savanna vegetation. Community wide involvement through the collaborative calibration, validation and application of fire mapping information from satellite data has resulted in improvement to the accuracy, utility and community ownership of the spatially enabled North Australian Fire Information web-based tool.

In this presentation we will outline the scientific methods employed for the various fire mapping products, including the history of the web-based technologies; we will provide a description of the take-up and cost benefits of the tool and; we will demonstrate the improvement in fire management through the application of the information made freely available to end-users across the most fire effected biomes of the Australian continent.