Placer County’s Collaborative Approach to Community Wildland Fire Resilience
The team uses Vibrant Planet to build an action plan that balances local needs
The Placer County Regional Forest Health team (Placer County team) manages a complex landscape, both in terms of natural and built features. Over 50% of the county is covered by wild and working forest lands, and most of that area is identified as high or very high fire hazard by CAL FIRE. Those same lands are adjacent to both sparsely and densely-built habitable and business structures – making Placer the county with the highest number of habitable structures in the fire-prone Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) of any county in California. To proactively manage this risk, the Placer County team recently launched a Regional Forest Health program. The program brings together community and practitioner perspectives and landscape data to build a collaborative action plan for reducing wildland fire risk and improving resilience across the county.
Kerri Timmer, Regional Forest Health Coordinator at the County of Placer explains, “to build our Regional Forest Health program, we wanted to follow a meaningful process that would take into account input from fire and forestry professionals as well as the local communities – who know their land better than anyone – but also one that could get us from inception to implementation as quickly as possible since the need is so great and funding availability can be so volatile.”
The team needed a scientifically justifiable tool that could help them define a data-driven roadmap of risk-mitigation projects that represented the community’s priorities and operated fast enough to help garner fluctuating funds.
The Challenge
The Placer County Regional Forest Health team (Placer County team) manages a complex landscape, both in terms of natural and built features. Over 50% of the county is covered by wild and working forest lands, and most of that area is identified as high or very high fire hazard by CAL FIRE. Those same lands are adjacent to both sparsely and densely-built habitable and business structures – making Placer the county with the highest number of habitable structures in the fire-prone Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) of any county in California. To proactively manage this risk, the Placer County team recently launched a Regional Forest Health program. The program brings together community and practitioner perspectives and landscape data to build a collaborative action plan for reducing wildland fire risk and improving resilience across the county.
Kerri Timmer, Regional Forest Health Coordinator at the County of Placer explains, “to build our Regional Forest Health program, we wanted to follow a meaningful process that would take into account input from fire and forestry professionals as well as the local communities – who know their land better than anyone – but also one that could get us from inception to implementation as quickly as possible since the need is so great and funding availability can be so volatile.”
The team needed a scientifically justifiable tool that could help them define a data-driven roadmap of risk-mitigation projects that represented the community’s priorities and operated fast enough to help garner fluctuating funds.
The Solution
To select a common evaluation framework that could support this level of detail while also making project-specific treatment recommendations, Timmer and team reviewed several options. She comments “we looked at various tools and platforms, but unlike Vibrant Planet, they couldn’t offer a near real-time demonstration of varying priorities, such as weighing safety versus natural resources, or dive down into the actual project design level, recommending specific treatment plans and budgets. These features on Vibrant Planet will help us further accelerate the environmental review, permitting, and fund development processes, leading to more treated acres on the ground.”
The team also leaned on colleagues in neighboring forests for suggestions. Truckee Fire Protection District had just worked with Vibrant Planet to help build a living CWPP in record time, and the Tahoe National Forest was using Vibrant Planet to build their own series of wildfire resilience projects within the Tahoe National Forest and Lake Tahoe Basin.
In early 2023, the Placer County team launched a working group that assembled thorough landscape data in preparation for using Vibrant Planet. They started by identifying their county’s key landscape features with societal value, such as homes, property, businesses, critical infrastructure, clean water, habitat, recreational areas, disaster evacuation routes, and water and power infrastructure. Their work to add detailed information to Vibrant Planet – about what mattered most to the county residents and key stakeholders – ensured that the technology would suggest the most accurate and appropriate fire risk mitigation projects to meet community and resource resilience goals.
“We wanted to move fast, but in the right direction,” explains Timmer. “To do that we needed help identifying and prioritizing the best areas to work, and Vibrant Planet helped us sharpen our focus and make sure we invest in work that will achieve the best results.”
.jpg)
The Results
Based on the thorough data curation of their community’s high-value assets, resources, and strategic resilience areas, the team was able to leverage Vibrant Planet to clearly identify several preliminary focus areas that would reduce risk, while enhancing what the county values most.
Moving forward, with these proposed focus areas in-hand, the team will be able to work with interested partners on specific projects, and see how other entities’ priorities align with the countywide needs and priorities. The team held four community sessions over the course of Spring 2024 to gather additional public input. These sessions were complemented with the results of a community-wide survey that asked residents to rate, on a scale of one to five, the landscape features that matter most to them, such as homes, parks, water sources, utility lines, evacuation routes, recreation sites, and more.
This community survey mirrors the objectives that can be prioritized within Vibrant Planet (example pictured right), so the Placer County team can use the platform to prioritize and sequence projects that reflect what matters most to Placer County – everything from emergency services to endangered species habitat. The objective valuation results from the survey will allow the Placer County team to evaluate wildfire risk to critical assets at all scales, from countywide to individual neighborhood, and use consensus among different protection scenarios to identify key areas for collaboration in project design and implementation.
By blending modeling data from Vibrant Planet, and both qualitative and quantitative results from their community, the Placer County forestry team is building a balanced, thoughtful, and streamlined framework for reducing wildland fire risk and enhancing county resilience in months versus years. Stay tuned for an update later this year with results from the community forums.
Interested in building your own fire risk reduction strategy? Get in touch with our team today.
