Wildfire Risk Across the Eastern Region
In April 2019, the Eastern Region of the U.S. Forest Service contracted with Pyrologix to conduct a spatial wildfire hazard assessment across all land ownerships in the Eastern Region states. The initial focus of the project was to conduct a wildfire risk assessment for homes, critical infrastructure, and water resources in the Eastern Region. Project delays, largely due to COVID-19, presented an opportunity to update the fuelscape using the LANDFIRE Remap (version 2.0.0) data, completed for all geographic areas in the Eastern Region in July of 2020. The delays provided the opportunity to update the fuelscape and to leverage recent improvements in fire intensity modeling. With the incorporation of these project additions, the Eastern Region assessment consisted of four parts: fuelscape update, wildfire hazard assessment, wildfire risk assessment, and summary of wildfire risk to the most-exposed communities in each state.
Initial fuel calibration efforts were conducted with LANDFIRE 2014 (version 1.4.0) data. In March 2019, Pyrologix led three in-person fuel calibration workshops hosted by the Region and attended by a wide array of local, state, and federal specialists in the fields of fuel characterization, fire ecology, and fire behavior modeling. These workshops were hosted in three locations to facilitate attendance across the large geographic area: Albany, NY; Martinsville, IN; and Milwaukee, WI. The information gathered in those workshops was used to calibrate the LANDFIRE 2014 fuelscape initially, and those edits were brought forward to calibrate the LANDFIRE Remap data, beginning in the fall of 2020.
