OUTCOME: Capacity

Problem

It is challenging and time intensive to maintain current data and information required for objective, criteria-driven planning and decisions on priority actions and investments. High quality data and assessments are constantly being developed by an array of public and private entities at a variety of scales, but can be difficult for local municipalities, CBOs, Tribes, landowners, and community groups to access and use. Additionally, mechanisms are needed to ensure that local and regional data are included in state and national datasets and assessments.

Solution

Data & Planning - Develop, update, and share data, maps, and analytical tools to evaluate and prioritize investments in resilient ecosystems and communities.

Background and Context

The North Coast Resource Partnership evaluates priorities at the regional and local scale, supporting projects and initiatives that achieve multiple benefits – including community and ecosystem resilience. The North Coast region includes large numbers of economically challenged, underrepresented, and underserved communities, with more than 50% of residents living under the poverty line. These communities are especially vulnerable to impacts from extreme events and climate change fueled disasters, including fires, floods, and drought. The region has experienced a disproportionate number of California’s damaging wildfires over the last twenty years. There are 34 Tribes with traditional and historical use territories in the North Coast region. Wildfires on or near native lands threaten the health, safety, and economy of those Tribes, including culturally important species, medicinal plants, traditional foods, and cultural sites (Bennett et al., 2014). In order to support and assist the region in planning and prioritizing community and ecosystem resilience projects, NCRP needs to maintain capacity and resources to regularly downscale and integrate data, as well as to provide accessible decision-making resources and tools to partners in the North Coast region.

Understanding the relationship between biophysical and socio-economic factors such as hazardous fuel loads, sensitive habitats and ecosystems, community location, social vulnerabilities, disaster risk, fire preparedness, and response capacity is critical to prioritizing investments at the regional scale (See NCRP Adaptive Planning and Prioritization Framework). It is also critical to ensure that communities understand their risk from extreme events and can lead their own resilience planning efforts. The ongoing maintenance of data, information, and analytic tools at a variety of spatial scales is critical to sound decision making. It requires capacity investments in both quantitative and qualitative data development, analysis, sharing, and interpretation. These investments would support communities, partner agencies, and CBOs in prioritizing planned actions and investments.

Recommendations

In January 2022 the USFS released a report entitled Confronting the Wildfire Crisis: A Strategy for Protecting Communities and Improving Resilience in America’s Forests. This report calls for “a paradigm shift in land management across jurisdictional boundaries to reduce risk and restore fire adapted landscapes.” This strategy will use data and mapping to focus fuel treatments strategically based on an analysis of risk to communities and focus on fuel treatment in large-scale firesheds that cross jurisdictional boundaries. In support of this strategy, NCRP will develop and annually update quantitative and qualitative data, maps, and analytical tools to evaluate and enhance the regional and local capacity to sustain resilient ecosystems and communities. These will include both geospatial data as well as interviews, surveys, and focus groups. NCRP will work with a diversity of Tribal, federal, state, and local partners to compile relevant data and tools at various spatial scales, identify data gaps, fill these gaps, create regional data sharing platforms, support ongoing assessments and decision support and prioritization frameworks. NCRP will provide support and training for users, partners, and private landowners in the region to fully access all of this information at no cost.

Actions

  • Regularly identify, acquire, downscale, and share new data sets from a variety of sources that may be relevant to NCRP and its partners in the North Coast region. This will include qualitative data collected from interviews, surveys, and/or focus groups.
  • Collaborate with agency, academic, Tribal, philanthropic, and NGO partners on regional data, templates, tools, and resources.
    • Identify regional partners for collaboration and conduct outreach and/or joint planning towards developing and sharing data resources.
    • Develop formal agreements and collaborations with federal and state agencies, universities, and science NGOs.
    • Collaborate with state and federal partners in development of the statewide Forest Data Hub as described in the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan Key Action 4.3.
  • Support Tribal confidentiality requirements, including supporting Tribes to hold and maintain their own internal TEK databases.
    • Engage with Tribal leadership to integrate Tribal science and TEK into regional assessments and prioritization frameworks.
    • Fund and support Tribal Data Stewards who are trained to work with Tribal data, including handling of sensitive spatial information that may be proprietary and confidential.
  • Develop regional remote sensing data, products, and derivatives – including LIDAR derivatives – to support regional assessments and evaluations, decision making and prioritization of investments.
  • Foster the transfer and adoption of technologies developed for fire response in southern California to the North Coast region. These include next generation fire forecasting tools, such as WIFIRE, new and better imagery for real time mapping and detection, and other tools and technologies.
  • Extend tree mortality mapping previously conducted in Lake and Mendocino counties throughout the region.

  • As part of the NCRP Adaptive Planning and Prioritization Framework, NCRP will maintain and regularly update a prioritized list of regional and local assessments that support watershed and community resilience and the ability to objectively prioritize investments in projects and actions. Following is a list of assessments that are proposed in the next three years:
    • Communities at risk/vulnerable communities and needed capacity investments to support locally led resilience actions and efforts.
    • Habitats at risk or vulnerable to declines in carrying capacity and ecosystem function.
    • Ladder fuels and hazardous fuel loading.
    • Analysis of woody feedstock locations, transport costs, emissions impacts.
    • Opportunities for nature-based solutions to loss of biodiversity and extreme events, such as sea level rise, flooding, drought, and wildfires.
    • Human health impacts of smoke from fires.
    • Adaptive assessment of post-fire restoration and regeneration opportunities.
    • Drought, pest, and climate change induced impacts on forests and wildfire behavior.
    • Fire spread and behavior models within the WUI.
    • Socioeconomic geodatabase with economic, capacity, and other related analyses.
    • Cost benefit analysis of local capacity for year-round fire prevention, preparation, firefighting, post-fire recovery.
    • Regional workforce analysis – current vs needed workforce.
    • Regional ecosystem services analysis.
    • Fire history, including historical burns and maps depicting numbers of overlapping fires.
  • Perform regional and local assessments that integrate Tribal, federal, state, and local knowledge to evaluate the North Coast landscape and prioritize areas for treatment as well as complement and ground-truth remote sensing data.
  • Evaluate the costs and benefits of managed fire policies that allow wildland fires to burn where structures are not threatened. Perform shared risk modelling using CAR, PODs, QWRA, and MTF to inform partners affected by decisions to manage wildfires for resource objectives.
  • Utilize PODs data, and vegetation data, including State and Transition models to create a spatial and temporally explicit map of both wanted and unwanted fire across the landscape based on current weather and fire indices, and the QWRA, to guide both the use of prescribed fire and wildfire management.
  • Curate and provide access to the latest wildfire related data from CAL FIRE, USFS, Pyrologix, academic partners, and other sources.
  • Document local, regional, and national data and decision support tools for use by regional and local project sponsors.
  • Develop tools that support Tribal communities to determine priority areas for fuel and landscape management that enhance cultural resources, subsistence resources, fire-resistant species for propagation and protection, and other Tribal priorities, including access to sites and protection of communities.
  • Support Tribes in updating datasets to document their cultural resources while protecting confidential data
  • Enhance data analysis and planning tools, including Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data, to better understand where on the ground to deploy different forest management strategies.
  • Review research analyzing pros and cons and barriers and constraints for different fuel reduction practices, including mechanical thinning, prescribed fire, grazing, hand crews, managed fire, biomass utilization, etc. Identify any data gaps and work with research/academic partners on plans to fill them.
  • Create and maintain a database of information on project approaches, best management practices, costs, personnel needs, and permitting requirements.
  • Evaluate the return on investment from supporting capacity enhancements for community-based prescribed fire efforts (PBAs and other groups), focusing not just on economic returns or acres treated, but also on projects planned, people trained, partnerships created, etc.
  • Identify and prioritize other analyses – biophysical, economic, socio-economic, financing structures, jurisdictional authorities, etc.
  • Develop a regional strategy to incorporate data from project proposals, environmental compliance reports, implementation reports, and post-treatment reviews to continuously evaluate the effects of restoration projects.
  • Develop a regional strategy to monitor fuel treatment effectiveness and to standardize monitoring methodologies and reporting standards to enable comparison across the region.
  • Create and regularly update a regional plan for Ecosystem Conservation & Restoration by evaluating, analyzing, and mapping where restoration is needed to meet healthy ecosystem and carbon sequestration goals, including recovery from and resilience to extreme events. (See Ecosystem Conservation & Restoration: Planning Solution)
  • Update maps of habitat and species occurrences using local, regional, state, and national data sets.
  • Conduct ongoing carbon mapping and documentation of emissions/loss of carbon from fires using available datasets.
  • Map habitat for sensitive, threatened, or endangered species and how these habitats might change due to climate change and species migration.
  • Map occurrence and potential habitat of species of cultural significance to Tribal communities, under the guidance of Tribal Data Stewards who are empowered to protect sensitive information.
  • Prioritize an assessment of the impact of abandoned or current mines on water quality, including sediment and toxic runoff, and on their impacts to water flows and groundwater/water tables in areas around mines.
  • Develop data to inform statewide plans (i.e., assess the cost effectiveness of different actions to address priorities in the region).
  • Document ROI from planned and implemented actions.
  • Allow flexibility for and document unexpected outcomes and learning opportunities.

  • NCRP will regularly update and refine the NCRP Adaptive Planning and Prioritization Framework, which describes a process for integrating data and assessments at a variety of scales to support the prioritization of investments, activities, and projects. Updating and refining will include local input and priorities, including the integration of TEK, Tribal science, and related Tribal management strategies.
  • Building on the data and assessments described above, NCRP and its partners will develop targeted plans for prioritizing investments in the following thematic areas:
  • Regional priority projects will be evaluated based on criteria adopted by NCRP and reflecting the shared priorities of regional partners including North Coast Tribes, federal agencies, state agencies, NGOs, RCDs, local agencies, businesses, landowners, and community groups. These projects will be regularly identified, evaluated, prioritized via Project Tracker, with performance metrics shared as projects are completed.

  • Regularly evaluate decision support and scenario planning tools for relevance to NCRP and its partners and provide information on this evaluation to partners in the region.
  • Evaluate the Sonoma County Decision Support Framework developed by Sonoma Water.
  • Seek to align with and support partner data and decision platforms.
  • Collaborate with Tribal, state, and federal agency partners in the development or use of landscape-scale planning tools to establish forest management and restoration priorities.
  • Provide support for Tribes, other local communities, state, federal, and academic partners to meet to establish PODs in the region, including funding for communities to conduct the field planning and actual physical work to accomplish the boundaries of PODs through successful fuels reduction projects (See Community Health & Safety: Fuel Breaks Solution).

  • Maintain online access to geospatial resources on NCRP website, as well as other data for download.
  • Facilitate the adoption of leading open data management practices similar in scope and intent to TOPS (Transform to Open Science) at NASA, or the policies for open data management in research at the National Science Foundation. To the extent practicable, NCRP will facilitate FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reproducible) data practices for project proposals and environmental compliance work.
  • Provide results from regional analyses and assessments to Tribal, local, state, federal, CBO, philanthropic, and academic partners.
  • Provide data access/sharing training so partners, especially CBOs without GIS staff, can access the data to use in their work.
  • Develop story maps and other interpretive tools to make data and assessments accessible to the general public and decision makers.
  • Share bibliographic resource database with partners via NCRP website.

  • Support NCRP partners in the region with data, analysis, mapping, and decision support tools.
  • Utilize NCRP’s technical consultant network to provide technical support for data usage (i.e., for PODs development and other data-related needs).
  • Provide education and training in data evaluation, analysis, and mapping.
  • Explore community-based and crowd-sourced monitoring programs, e.g. iNaturalist, Stream Watch, ESRI Field Maps, EpiCollect5.
  • Explore high-school and community college training programs to build long-term technical capacity within communities and to help collect monitoring data.
  • Provide examples of successful grant applications for others to use as a model or template.

References and Resources

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