Grant from CALFIRE for participatory modeling and mapping to plan for fire resilience in Tuolumne County

April 2024 will mark the start of a four-year CALFIRE grant to the Center, on science synthesis and decision support for community fire resilience.  MV Eitzel (Center Researcher) will lead the effort, with Ryan Meyer (Center Executive Director), Emily Schlickman (UC Davis Professor of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Design), and Craig Konklin (Tuolumne County Fire Safe Council).

The project is focused on building and supporting communities of practice for fire resilience. A community-based approach to planning over large areas of the landscape can support collective solutions for landowners and residents with a diversity of values and priorities. Many tools have been developed to support vegetation management and other strategies for reducing fire risk, but there is often a gap between, for example, top-down efforts by the state, and bottom-up needs of communities. Our grant is focused on building a toolkit tailored to enable communities to discuss and navigate the trade-offs between ecological, cultural, aesthetic, and safety concerns, and to help them to coordinate fuels reduction treatments in a way that results in lower landscape-level risk.

We are looking forward to forging new relationships with communities in Tuolumne County, and are thrilled to be advancing collaborative approaches to pressing issues around fire resilience throughout California. The project also offers an excellent opportunity to advance practices in participatory modeling and data science. Community and Citizen Science has great potential to support both the understanding of what makes a landscape and community resilient in the face of high fire risk, and the application of this knowledge to make a difference for people on the ground.