A suite of bushfire assessment tools for Australian consultants, built on QGIS — the free, open-source GIS used by millions worldwide. Measure slope and separation straight off a bare-earth DEM and get the full BAL setback ladder in seconds, powered by the verified FlameView Pro radiant-heat engine — on a platform with no ceiling.
We build our specialist bushfire tools on the most capable open source mapping platform there is — so you get purpose-built assessment tools on top of a full professional GIS, and you keep all of it.
Print layouts, symbology, expressions, the processing toolbox, 3D views, point clouds, mesh and raster analysis — everything a complete professional GIS does, ready whenever your work calls for it.
QGIS costs nothing — no seat licence, no annual platform fee, ever. Your subscription pays for bushfire capability, not for a bundled map viewer.
Millions of users and decades of shared knowledge — forums, GIS Stack Exchange, YouTube tutorials and formal training courses for almost anything you'll ever want to do on a map.
GeoPackage, shapefiles, LiDAR LAS/LAZ, live WMS/WFS feeds, ELVIS DEMs — if it's spatial, QGIS opens it. Your data lives in open formats, on your machine, on your terms.
QGIS print layouts produce the styled, scaled map figures that go straight into a BAL report or bushfire study. Build the template once and reuse it on every job.
QGIS proficiency is a mainstream industry skill you carry across jobs, disciplines and staff — time spent learning it pays off far beyond bushfire assessment.
FlameView Pro GIS ships with a customised interface that strips away the clutter of the full QGIS layout and replaces it with a clean, targeted workspace that's easy to navigate — your bushfire tools front and centre. And nothing is taken away: all of QGIS's functionality remains, ready to be switched back on whenever you need it.
The suite is developed by a practising bushfire consultant with over 20 years of specialist bushfire experience. Every tool comes from real jobs, real reports and real deadlines — and the suite is under constant, active development.
A Method 2 BAL setback needs slope and separation measured off the DEM, then fed into a radiant-heat calculation. Doing that by hand means jumping between QGIS, a slope tool, and a spreadsheet — copying numbers, hoping nothing got transposed.
It's slow, and every manual hop is a chance for error.
FlameView Pro GIS keeps the whole workflow inside QGIS — measure on the map, get the answer on the map.
Purpose-built bushfire tools that live inside QGIS — on your toolbar, on your canvas, in your project. More on the way, all sharing one verified calculation engine and one licence.
Three clicks → the full BAL setback ladder
Click the vegetation edge, click into the vegetation, click toward the building. The tool samples the bare-earth DEM, derives effective slope, site slope and separation, and calls the FlameView Pro engine for BAL‑FZ / 40 / 29 / 19 / 12.5 setbacks — both horizontal and along‑ground.
Short Fire Run → run-length-aware setbacks
The same three-click workflow as Method 2, but powered by the FlameView Pro Short Fire Run model. The fire head width is derived from the fire run length you measure on the canvas, so setbacks reflect the real run rather than a fixed flame front — typically tighter than Method 2 for the same vegetation and slope.
Deemed to Satisfy → the published tables, on the map
The acceptable-solution sibling of Method 2 and SFR. Draw a slope run over the bare-earth DEM, aim the BAL chain, and the BAL‑FZ / 40 / 29 / 19 / 12.5 distances come straight from the published deemed-to-satisfy tables — AS3959‑2018 Table 2.4 and PBP 2019 — nothing computed, fully self-contained.
The whole site, loaded in one click
Set up a bushfire pre-assessment in seconds. One-click buttons pull live NSW data straight onto the canvas — cadastre, Bush Fire Prone Land, fire history, imagery and the State Vegetation Type Map — over any NSW extent, plus a tiered slope tool that uses the live 5 m DEM or your own local 1 m LiDAR where you have it.
Draw a line on the DEM — slope, elevation & bearing
Draw straight lines over your DEM and capture slope, elevation and bearing along each as feature attributes — fast, repeatable checks for run lines, access and documentation. Everything is stored in a single GeoPackage and always measured in your project CRS, so GDA94 / GDA2020 projects line up with no offset.
Report-ready slope zones — polygons, areas, provenance
Turn a DEM into defensible slope-zone polygons, not a throwaway slope raster. Classify the canvas or a drawn area into AS3959‑2018 Table 2.4 slope bands (or your own custom class table), with a minimum mapping unit so the output is clean zones rather than pixel noise. Click the dwelling and every zone is tagged upslope or downslope of it — the land above the asset highlights at a glance.
Stream centrelines & riparian buffers from the DEM
Extract stream centrelines straight from your DEM and build riparian buffers around them — the watercourses and vegetation corridors that shape a bushfire assessment. Set an area of interest, run it over tiled elevation data, and save the result as a layer or to file.
Build your 1 m LiDAR library, shire by shire
One toolbar button opens it in your browser. Orders 1 m DEM — and point cloud — tiles from Geoscience Australia's ELVIS for a whole LGA, a drawn area or a single address, then files everything into one central folder your GIS tools read automatically. Smart filters skip built-up land with no mapped bushfire hazard, tiles you already hold, and superseded surveys.
Percentage canopy cover from LiDAR
Turn a LiDAR point cloud into a defensible canopy cover figure. Load LAS/LAZ tiles (or grab them via the ELVIS portal helper), draw or select your area of interest, and get the canopy height model, a canopy mask, canopy polygons and the percentage cover — with exclusion zones for buildings.
Site photos, mapped where they were taken
Import geotagged site photos and drop each one on the map as a numbered marker with a direction arrow showing where the camera was pointing. Click a marker to open the full photo, tick photos in and out, then export a tidy photo-location table straight to Word or CSV for your report.
Never lose a temporary layer again
QGIS scratch (memory) layers live in RAM only — quick sketches, digitising and temporary edits vanish when you save a project. Save Scratch Layers fixes that in one click: it writes every scratch layer to a GeoPackage beside the project, re-points the layers in place keeping their styling, and saves the project. A button sits right next to Save, so it becomes your new save habit.
BAL zones across a whole site, from the vegetation edge
Trace each vegetation edge, tell it what's growing there and how the land slopes, and it maps the BAL zones — FZ, 40, 29, 19 and 12.5 — as clean nested bands. Every edge carries its own vegetation and slope, so one layer covers a site where the hazard changes from one boundary to the next, and zones of the same level merge into one continuous band instead of overlapping blobs. Setbacks come from AS 3959-2018 Table 2.4 or Planning for Bush Fire Protection 2019, at the FDI you choose.
Landscape fire intensity, as a raster
Maps fire-line intensity across a landscape rather than at a single point. Combines the terrain, the fuel and the fire weather into a classified intensity surface you can style, overlay and report from — for strategic studies, rezonings and landscape-scale assessment where a point calculation isn't enough.
BAL bands × cadastre → a per-lot answer
Takes your BAL bands and the cadastre and works out what each lot actually gets: which ratings fall on it, how much of it they cover, and which lots are affected at all. Turns a rainbow map into a table you can hand to a client or a council.
Nearest brigade, station and hospital — on the map
Finds the emergency services around a site and puts them on the map with distances, so the "nearest fire station" paragraph writes itself. Pick a centre, set a radius, choose which services matter, and export the table into your report.
Annotate the canvas, snip it, done
For the map you need in five minutes, not five layouts. Drop bushfire symbols — hydrants, water supply, access, assets — and rotatable labels that follow roads and rivers, switch on a north arrow and scale bar, and copy the canvas straight to the clipboard.
Nudge the cadastre onto the imagery
Cadastral boundaries and aerial imagery rarely line up. This shifts and rotates a parcel layer onto what you can actually see, by a controlled increment, and records the offset you applied — so the adjustment is deliberate, repeatable and documented rather than a silent drag.
The suite keeps growing
FlameView Pro GIS is constantly being developed and improved — new tools, refinements and additions land regularly. Got an idea for a new app, or a modification to an existing one? Send it through and it will be considered.
The Method 2 Setbacks workflow, on the map.
Start of the run and the pivot point — the edge of the classified vegetation.
A → B gives the effective slope under the vegetation, sampled from the DEM.
A → C gives the site slope and separation. The BAL ladder is returned and drawn on the canvas.
FlameView Pro GIS doesn't reimplement the bushfire maths — it wraps the FlameView Pro radiant-heat engine as the single source of truth.
View-factor radiant heat flux with the full Appendix B formulas.
Signed effective & site slopes derived by headlessly-tested 3-point trig.
AS3959, PBP 2019 and NSW fuel-load lists, lifted verbatim from FlameView Pro.
Both setback bases returned, so the right one goes straight into your report.
The engine runs on our server — the tools stay light and the maths stays consistent.
Known-good results locked as automated tests so the numbers never drift.
QGIS is a complete professional GIS — print layouts, 3D, LiDAR, live data services and a huge ecosystem of community add-ons — maintained by a worldwide open-source project and free forever. Building on it means all of our effort goes into bushfire tools rather than reinventing a GIS, and you get a world-class mapping platform with specialist bushfire tools on top.
QGIS is one of the most widely taught GIS packages in the world — there are free tutorials, YouTube walkthroughs and formal courses for everything. And you don't need to master it first: FlameView Pro GIS ships with a tailored profile that simplifies the interface to what bushfire work actually uses, and the Quick Assessment tool loads a full site setup — cadastre, Bush Fire Prone Land, imagery, vegetation and terrain — with one-click buttons. You're productive on day one and grow into the rest of QGIS at your own pace.
QGIS 3.34 or newer — a free download from qgis.org — a bare-earth (DEM) raster loaded in your project, and an internet connection: the calculation runs on our server and is gated by your API key.
Access is by subscription with a per-user API key. Request access below and we'll set you up — one key works across the whole tool suite.
It uses the same verified radiant-heat engine, but FlameView Pro GIS is a separate product: a suite of mapping tools that bring those calculations onto the map. It runs on its own independent infrastructure.
No. It's a measurement and calculation tool. Professional judgement is still required for vegetation classification, site assessment and report preparation.
Each run appends a row to a local GeoPackage run sheet in your project — you can export it to CSV. Calculations are not stored permanently on the server.
Tell us a little about your work and we'll set you up with a key. One subscription covers the whole FlameView Pro GIS tool suite.