The state’s Forest Service unveiled in September its first-ever wildfire risk explorer, a digital interactive map that provides anyone - from residents and landowners to fire managers and local officials - an up-close look at the state’s fire risk. “While it might seem redundant to have national risk products and state risk products and even local risk products, it's actually, in many cases, not because you can think of it as a refinement as you go down in scale,” Dillon added. While different contractors and states take varied approaches, most use the same building blocks that are used to create federal fire risk tools, said Gregory Dillon, director of the Forest Service’s fire modeling institute. It’s a process that entails using satellite imagery, census information and other data sources to pinpoint where wildfires have a high probability of starting, how intense a fire might be once ignited and what types of resources - likes homes, infrastructure or a local watershed - a potential blaze would threaten. To help improve their wildfire risk maps, many states are partnering with private firms such as Montana-based Pyrologix, which specialize in doing risk analysis and in some cases building public portals to display the results. 'All year round and all over the country' Why? Because the climate is changing, the fire environment is changing,” said Joe Scott, founder of Pyrologix, a wildfire risk assessment and modeling firm. “There is a slowly growing push amongst different states to do this. And many states haven’t dedicated enough - if any - consistent funding to keep the tools up to date.īut forestry and fire officials in states such as Colorado, Oregon, Utah and Texas are stepping up their efforts to ensure they have high-quality fire risk data, models and maps to more accurately determine which areas are most at risk - and where they should focus risk mitigation efforts. States in recent years have struggled to keep pace with the changes. residents who live in wildfire-prone regions. Scientists say weather extremes made worse by global warming will only increase the risk of wildfires - a danger that is compounded by the growing number of U.S. history, including 20 when blazes torched more than 10 million acres both years. The past decade has seen some of the most destructive wildfire seasons in U.S. It's an upgrade that has put in place a “powerful” tool capable of driving wildfire mitigation, Manriquez said - and one that comes as communities across Colorado and the country brace for a future of climate-juiced wildfires. After an infusion of $480,000 in state funds, Colorado unveiled a new map that included a host of updates, such as the pine beetle damage and a greater emphasis on many now-densely populated mountain towns. “But we weren’t using it because it didn’t reflect what we knew to be.”įast forward to last July. “We were supposed to use” the map, said Carolina Manriquez, a lead forester with the state’s forest service. There, but unmarked on the map, was more than 3 million acres of forest where mountain pine beetles had killed lodgepole, limber and ponderosa pines - transforming the forest floor into a tinderbox of dead kindling. It was long outdated, especially in the state’s western half. CLIMATEWIRE | For years, Colorado’s wildfire risk map was so inaccurate that state officials all but ignored it.
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