The Community Fire Planning Zone is the area in and around communities within which fire planners should look for opportunities to improve public safety through fuel treatment, infrastructure improvement, and public education. It consists of the community itself and a "buffer zone" managed to reduce the potential for sustained crown fire and to improve the safety of firefighters working to protect structures. Generally, the buffer need be no more than a half mile wide, but it can be adjusted locally to account for steep slopes, particularly dangerous fuel conditions, or to include natural fuel breaks.

To develop this map of the CFPZ, we identified communities exceeding one house per forty acres (the minimum density of a wildland-urban interface community, according to the January 4, 2001, Federal Register notice "Urban wildland interface communities within the vicinity of Federal lands that are at high risk from wildfire" (F.R. 66(3):751-777)) based on housing density calculated from modified Census 2000 blocks. We modified the original Census blocks by subtracting public land and recalculated housing density based on the area of private land. Second, we buffered these communities by a half-mile to approximate the CFPZ. Third, we refined the CFPZ by removing non-wildland fuels (water, barren, rock, agriculture, and urban land cover classes identified from the National Land Cover Dataset obtained from the USGS).

Thus, our map of the CFPZ represents natural vegetation within one-half-mile of communities.