Wildfires and droughts are increasingly threatening New Zealand’s landscapes, communities, infrastructure and primary industries. To prepare, we need accurate information about the fire environment. While we already have detailed weather and landscape data, we lack the same level of information about the fuels that feed fires. The Near Real-Time Fuel Moisture System for Wildfire and Drought project - part of the New Zealand-NASA Joint Research Programme in Earth Observation - aims to close that gap.

Wildfire fuels include both live vegetation and dead materials like leaves and twigs, but live fuel moisture is especially important and currently under-researched. It strongly influences how fires start, spread and reach the canopy - yet it has been missing from operational fire assessments until now. By combining fuel moisture with fuel type, this project will deliver a new tool for wildfire prediction and drought monitoring in New Zealand, strengthening fire danger assessments, improving warning systems, and reducing economic and environmental losses.

For Phase 2, the team is building a Near Real Time (NRT) system to track fuel moisture and fuel type, showing how vegetation changes, dries out and recovers across places and over time (from days to years). This will provide the missing piece needed to better predict when and where fire hazard is highest.

This is the first project in New Zealand to use remotely sensed data for fuel moisture. The team will use NASA’s Harmonised Landsat–Sentinel-2 (HLS) data product that combines information from Landsat-8/9 and Sentinel-2A/B satellites. This data provides images for New Zealand every 3 days at 30-metre resolution - offering frequent and detailed updates. Researchers will combine this data with on-the-ground fuel measurements to develop and validate predictive models for grasslands, shrublands and forests.

Led by the New Zealand Institute for Bioeconomy Science in collaboration with NASA Ames Research Center, Australian National University, the US Forest Service, and Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ). The project has been funded by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), receiving $1.28 million over three years from the Catalyst Fund (Strategic). Projects commenced in June 2025.

Further reading

Strategic New Zealand - NASA joint research programme in Earth Observation

Watch this space: Scion working with NASA (Phase 1)