Development and Application of the Fireshed Registry

The Fireshed Registry is an interactive geospatial data portal providing access to data describing past, present, and future trends regarding wildfire exposure to communities and forest and fuel management. The registry employs a nested spatial framework that organizes landscape variation in wildfire risk to developed areas into containers or “firesheds” and displays these data on a background of maps on management and disturbances, including past and predicted wildfire events and their potential impacts. It was built in close cooperation with USDA Forest Service staff and establishes a nationally consistent, all-lands, scalable framework for classifying fireshed conditions in terms of underlying wildfire transmission and the potential to mitigate exposure and risk. Foremost, the framework provides a foundation for communication and coordination with external agencies and partners for cross-boundary collaboration and can potentially improve agency national reporting and monitoring of programs. The registry provides the Forest Service with a planning framework for tracking changes in fireshed conditions with respect to wildfire exposure at forest, regional, and national scales. We describe the process of building the system, sources of data, and its application within the agency for decision support and reporting for multiple ongoing programs related to forest and landscape management.

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