Wildfire Risk Assessments Tools & Models

A foundational step in the quantification of any benefits associated with wildfire mitigation projects should be an assessment of current wildfire risk within a water supply watershed. A wide range of resources exist to assist water providers in undertaking this type of assessment.

Several resources exist to model wildfire risk. Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools (LANDFIRE) is a key national geospatial data source for strategic fire and resource management planning and analysis. LANDFIRE products help land managers identify strategic fuel and forest health treatment priorities and deliver data for community risk assessments. The Large Fire Simulator (FSim) (Finney et al., 2011) can also be used to model fire likelihood. Another resource, FlamMap5, can be used model wildfire behavior metrics in a moderate-fire and extreme-fire scenarios.

To estimate the effects of restoration projects, the Interagency Fuel Treatment Decision Support System (IFTDSS) integrates LANDFIRE and other tools in a single interface that allows users to model predicted fire behavior under a variety of weather conditions and fuels reduction scenarios such as thinning, clear cuts, and prescribed burning. It can be used at a variety of scales from local to landscape level.  This resource can be useful in estimating the wildfire risk reduction benefits of potential or actual restoration projects. The effects of low tech process-based restoration (LTPBR) are not inherently integrated into IFTDSS or other, similar models. However, these models may be “tweaked” to deliver estimates of specific LTPBR benefits.

In recent years, private sector data analytics providers have created web-accessible platforms that provide wildfire mitigation and recovery scenario assessments. Land Tender, a decision support tool developed by Vibrant Planet with support from federal and state fire and land management agencies, integrates high-resolution spatial and land cover data, fire risk modeling, and economic valuation methodologies in a platform that allows users to model a range of scenarios and outcomes. This proprietary software requires a purchase or subscription to access their resources.

Pyrologix uses similar amalgamations of data to provide tailored wildfire risk assessments for community planners, government agencies and others. The State of California and Google have collaborated to develop Planscape, an open-source platform that combines operations of a series of complex models to evaluate and prioritize fire risk mitigation scenarios. While currently limited to covering forested areas in California, the open-source nature of the platform may enable customization to other geographies. NASA has provided on-line trainings to facilitate learning about sources and applications of satellite data for wildfire risk and impact assessment.