Sonoma County Wildfire Resilience Planner

Efforts are underway in Sonoma County to provide critical information at multiple scales to facilitate strategic, ecologically-sensitive fuel management across the region. The Sonoma County Wildfire Resilience Decision Support Framework is part of a county-wide coordinated initiative to prioritize actions and investments by Sonoma Water, University of California Cooperative Extension, the Community Wildfire Protection Plan, and Sonoma County’s Office of Climate Action & Resiliency. The tool is not available for public use at present, but watch this space for when it does.

Two online decision-support tools make up the Framework:

The Wildfire Resilience Planner: Supporting Strategic Planning at the Landscape Scale

Sonoma Water has partnered with Conservation Biology Institute (CBI), Pepperwood Preserve, Tukman Geospatial, and community stakeholders to support strategic investments in fuel load reduction for the long-term resilience of Sonoma County’s communities and watersheds. The partnership is creating the Wildfire Resilience Planner, an online decision support tool that applies science and expert knowledge to prioritize locations where the reduction of fuels will best protect lives and property, community infrastructure, ecosystem services, and biodiversity. The tool will encourage collaborative planning of projects on public and private land, helping to leverage individual efforts for a unified and strategic approach to wildland fuels management. The Wildfire Resilience Planner is currently in beta review by Sonoma County stakeholders. For more information contact Susan Haydon, susan.haydon@scwa.ca.gov or, Deanne DiPietro, deanne.dipietro@consbio.org.

The Wildfire Fuel Mapper: Property-Specific Information for Fuels Management

The University of California Cooperative Extension, Pepperwood Preserve, and Tukman Geospatial have developed the Wildfire Fuel Mapper. The Wildfire Fuel Mapper provides landowners and managers with a set of tools, resources, and information for designing and implementing projects to reduce wildland fuels. For more information contact Stephanie Larson slarson@ucanr.edu or Tosha Comendant tcomendant@pepperwoodpreserve.org.