Project Duration
2024-2028
Location
Tuolumne County, California
Background
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. This CALFIRE grant supports
a project in Tuolumne County that 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.
In development over the next four years, this toolkit will help
integrate the needs and preferences of the county’s residents
with fire management and safety practices that help manage
vegetation and plan around wildfire.
Our key objectives are to build a common understanding with
community members on long-term and short-term priorities by:
- Understanding fire risks at both individual and community
levels
- Bringing together people with different levels of experience
with the local environment to develop coordinated strategies in
different areas
- Recognizing that people are dependent on each other’s efforts
to protect against wildfire and that everyone faces unique
challenges in mitigating threats
- Engaging in two-way learning, focusing on both sharing
information on wildfire behavior and engaging
with local communities to learn about their experiences with
wildfire as well as their vegetation management preferences
We will test out tools to support this coordinated planning by:
- Reviewing existing tools and understanding how individuals
and communities can make use of them
- Testing specific tools that can support goals identified for
specific communities
- Assessing the usefulness of these tools and generating ideas
for new tools
Collaborators
M.V.
Eitzel Solera, Postdoctoral Scholar & Center Researcher
Ryan Meyer, Center Executive Director
Funder 
CALFIRE
Partners
UC Davis Landscape Architecture & Environmental Design,
Tuolumne County Fire Safe Council
