Targeting the Community Fire Planning Zone: Mapping Matters

May 1, 2005

Protecting communities threatened by wildland fire is one of the highest priorities of federal fire policy. The National Fire Plan and the 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy have called on federal agencies such the USDA Forest Service and the USDOI Bureau of Land Management to focus their efforts on the “wildland-urban interface,” where private homes abut fire-prone public wildlands. Determining where to focus community protection efforts, such as establishing adequate water supplies and cutting trees and brush, requires identifying a Community Fire Planning Zone (CFPZ), the area where special management attention is needed to protect communities and homes. However, exactly where these efforts should be focused — and what land, exactly, the CFPZ includes — has been a subject of debate and confusion.

In order to design the most cost-effective fuels treatments for community protection, it is imperative that fire managers first have an understanding of exactly where communities at risk of wildfire are located across the landscape. Pinpointing the location of critical areas requires sophisticated tools of geographic analysis, including data that describe housing density, land ownership, and vegetation.

Unfortunately, such analyses vary from state to state. Disparate state definitions of the CFPZ mean that communities facing similar threats may be considered to be at risk of wildfire in one state but excluded in another, and thus deprived of essential federal resources to help reduce that risk. These inconsistent definitions not only hamper fire planning in some communities, they also make comparison and use in national policymaking nearly impossible.

In order to learn how various state definitions of communities affect identification of the CFPZ, this report seeks to compare “apples to apples” by applying one consistent, simplified definition of community to three fire-prone landscapes: the Colorado Front Range, the Central Idaho Ecosystem, and the Greater Yosemite area in California. Each landscape displays different land ownership and land cover patterns and thus presents singular community protection challenges.