A fuelscape for all land ownerships in the state of California
The Pacific Southwest Region of the USDA Forest Service contracted Pyrologix to complete an assessment of wildfire hazard across all land ownerships in the state of California. The foundation of any wildfire hazard assessment is a current-condition fuelscape, updated for recent disturbances and calibrated to reflect the fire behavior potential realized in recent historical wildfire events. We leveraged LANDFIRE 2016 Remap 2.0.0 (LF Remap) data to generate a calibrated fuelscape for use in this statewide assessment.
LF Remap was released in the spring of 2019 with significant improvements from previous versions of LANDFIRE, including the use of new satellite imagery and continuous vegetation cover and height classifications1 . LF Remap data represents ground conditions circa 2016, based on 2013-2017 Landsat 8 satellite imagery with priority given to 2016 imagery2 . Starting from LF Remap as the most up-to-date fuel and vegetation available for CA, we aimed to calibrate the fuel mapping to observed fire behavior, make use of the new LF Remap data and features to the fullest extent, update the fuelscape to reflect recent disturbances, and produce a landscape absent of seamlines due to LANDFIRE map zone boundaries.
