NCRP CAL FIRE Forest Health Pilot Regional Assessment

The North Coast Resource Partnership (NCRP) has received a $10 million Forest Health Grant intended to produce a regional, landscape scale portfolio of projects that implement key goals outlined in CAL FIRE's Forest Health Program. The NCRP and its partners are working to identify and prioritize projects as part of a Forest Health Pilot aimed at supporting forest treatments to accomplish these goals. To aid in this process, the NCRP and Tukman Geospatial created a regionwide screening assessment focused on mapping priority areas for mechanical forest health treatments to mitigate wildfire hazard and promote resilient forests. This assessment is intended to be used as a tool to help evaluate proposed projects in the domain of mechanical treatments and contextualize them within California's North Coast Region based on a number of relevant landscape factors. Other critical categories of forest health treatments, including reforestation and prescribed and cultural fire, are also being evaluated as part of this process. However, they are not explicitly featured in this assessment because the needed high-resolution spatial datasets to conduct landscape scale prioritization of such projects do not currently exist, and NCRP expects that the rationale for these projects will be derived from local expert knowledge from practitioners on the ground. This story map summarizes the workflow used to develop the regional assessment and presents the results of the assessment in an interactive format that can be viewed alongside maps of disadvantaged communities and aboveground carbon. It also includes a brief comparison with the CAL FIRE Fire and Resource Assessment Program's Priority Landscapes, a complementary landscape assessment that is built around similar categories to the NCRP regional assessment.

To download a raster of the regional forest fuels reduction treatment priority map, visit this link:  https://arcg.is/1DL0D51 

CAL FIRE has awarded the North Coast Resource Partnership (NCRP) a Forest Health Grant in the amount of $10 million. The grant is a pilot or test bed intended to result in a regional, landscape scale portfolio of projects that implement the goals of the CAL FIRE Forest Health Program, as well as evaluate opportunities to connect CAL FIRE’s Forest Health program with the priorities outlined in the  Vision for North Coast Resilience  funded by the California Department of Conservation’s Regional Forest and Fire Capacity (RFFC) Program. Additionally, the Pilot is intended to evaluate opportunities for NCRP to partner with CAL FIRE to prioritize and implement an array of forest health projects in the North Coast Region using the regional grant model as a way to achieve the goals of California’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force, including its ambitious Million Acre Strategy for Wildfire and Forest Resilience. It is important to note that this CAL FIRE Forest Health Pilot is one project of many NCRP initiatives, many of which are included in the Vision for North Coast Resilience, and all of which are guided by the NCRP mission, goals, objectives and principles outlined in the plan's  overview section .

For this Pilot, NCRP and its partners are identifying and prioritizing projects in the CAL FIRE Forest Health Categories listed below: 

1. Forest fuels reduction
2. Cultural fire
3. Prescribed fire 
4. Pest management 
5. Reforestation 
6. Biomass utilization 

Land acquisition is not included in this Pilot due to the length of time that a typical real estate transaction requires.

The regional screening level assessment focuses on using spatial data to help evaluate projects that fall under the category of mechanical or manual forest fuels reduction. Three other critical forest health project categories - land conservation, prescribed and cultural fire, as well as ecological restoration/reforestation - are not explicitly featured in this regional assessment due to a lack of regional scale data on these topics. Instead, this information will be provided at the sub-regional scale by local experts to inform project evaluation related to these topics. As more regional scale data on these topics become available, the assessment will be updated accordingly.

The  North Coast Resource Partnership (NCRP)  is a long term, innovative and successful collaboration among Northern California Tribes, counties, NGOs, RCDs, business, and diverse stakeholders. The NCRP region covers over 19,000 square miles – 12% of the California landscape – and includes the Tribal lands and the counties of Del Norte, Humboldt, Trinity, Siskiyou, Modoc, Mendocino and Sonoma. The NCRP is governed by a Leadership Council comprised of appointees from the 30 federally recognized Tribes in the region as well as seven county boards of supervisors. Since 2004, the partnership has engaged in collaborative, integrated planning and project implementation, and with key state, federal and philanthropic partners, has invested over $100 million in hundreds of projects that benefit the North Coast Region’s communities and watersheds. 

NCRP’s prioritization and selection of projects relies on an  Adaptive Planning and Prioritization Framework  (APPF) that uses the best available science and data – combined with local knowledge and expertise – to prioritize geographic areas for investment in the North Coast Region. Figure 1 represents the APPF, and the processes that integrate regional assessments with local knowledge and expertise, combined with rigorous, equitable and transparent evaluation and selection processes and performance reporting. 

This framework intentionally integrates and aligns with the goals and objectives of partner agencies including CAL FIRE, and has processes in place to:

a)       Ensure that there is an equitable opportunity for all project sponsors to participate in regional, state and federal funding opportunities, via competitive and publicly accessible Requests for Proposals b)      Objectively evaluate and rank projects via the NCRP Technical Peer Review Committee and a team of technical experts c)       Support project sponsors with technical assistance to ensure project readiness d)      Document all projects in a regional Project Tracking tool e)      Report on performance for individual projects and the regional portfolio of projects

The NCRP regional assessment team – led by Tukman Geospatial – will build upon existing regional assessments and conduct a North Coast Regional Forest Health Screening to prioritize forest health project areas, per CAL FIRE Forest Health categories. The NCRP regional assessment leverages several methods developed and implemented by Tukman Geospatial and One Tam for the Marin Regional Forest Health Strategy. Assessment and dataset drafts will be reviewed by CAL FIRE, FRAP, and other expert peer reviewers in the North Coast Region and California, and their suggested refinements will be incorporated.

This regional assessment and its corresponding maps are intended to filter and stratify the landscape through the lens of CAL FIRE Forest Health priorities in the North Coast Region, as well as provide background information for the development of projects by partners in the Region. Local knowledge – obtained via the Request for Proposal (RFP) process and/or local planning documents – will augment and refine the regional screening assessment.

The result of this work will be a set of NCRP Landscape Priority Areas for Forest Health Projects. The priority area mapping will produce both maps of the high priority areas for forest health projects, as well as tabular totals that show the acreage of high priority areas predicted by the model for the entire NCRP area and for subregions.

This story map provides a walkthrough for the regional assessment. At this time the draft of the Forest Fuels Reduction Priority Area Mapping is complete. Methods and initial findings are presented here.

The aim of forest fuels reduction projects is to strategically reduce hazardous fuels across the landscape, especially buildup of wildland fuels that pose a risk to forest health - including the vitality of watersheds, ecosystems, habitats and communities that are part of the forested landscapes.

The mapping of forest fuels reduction treatment priority areas is meant to be used as a screening tool, not as a definitive ranking. It should be used in combination with local knowledge and field assessments. The mapping is based on a number of regional geospatial inputs. The NCRP has chosen to keep the model simple, and to limit the inputs that are known to have reasonable accuracy. NCRP has intentionally chosen not to use datasets derived from moderate resolution satellite data that purport to map forest condition or forest structure, since such datasets often have low or unknown accuracy. This simple model provides a ranking that prioritizes areas of existing woody vegetation that haven't been recently treated, have either burned at high intensity or not burned at all in recent years, don't have low treatment feasibility (e.g., they are on very steep ground), have high burn probability and high predicted flame lengths, are in or close to the WUI, and have exhibited high rates of tree mortality in the past five years. The logic model below provides more information on the inputs and weights used by the model.

Along with direct benefits related to ecosystem health and fire hazard mitigation, forest health projects can produce benefits in other key areas such as community equity and carbon stabilization/long-term carbon sequestration. These additional "co-benefits" are important considerations in forest health project planning, and the treatment priority maps can be used in conjunction with other data to incorporate co-benefits into the planning process.

To provide an example of how this can work, the following sections allow you to view maps of disadvantaged communities and aboveground live carbon in relation to the regional and sub-regional treatment priority maps. The map of disadvantaged communities is critical for ensuring that forest treatments are applied in a manner that promotes equity and can help determine areas where predicted high-priority mechanical fuels reduction treatments may have a greater impact on these communities. The map of aboveground live carbon highlights areas with larger contributions to carbon stabilization and can be useful in identifying areas where a high modeled priority for mechanical treatments aligns with an abundance of stable aboveground carbon, which is important for protecting stable carbon on the landscape.

The disadvantaged communities layer was created using data from the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) based on the 2020 American Community Survey data (click  here  for more information). The aboveground forest carbon layer was obtained from the U.S. Forest Service's 2013 CONUS Forest Carbon Stocks dataset, which is based on imputation from the Forest Inventory and Analysis program's annual forest inventory data (click  here  for more information).

Use the slider on the following two maps to switch between viewing the regional fuels reduction treatment priority ranking and either the disadvantaged communities layer or the aboveground live carbon layer. Click on the button in the bottom left corner to expand the legend for both maps. Click on the + and - buttons in the bottom right corner to zoom in and out. The disadvantaged communities map shows significant overlap between severely disadvantaged communities and predicted high-priority mechanical treatment areas throughout the Trinity and Klamath Mountains sub-regions especially, as well as in the northern portion of the Russian River sub-region. The aboveground forest carbon map shows larger areas of overlap between aboveground carbon and modeled high-priority areas in the western parts of the Trinity and Klamath Mountains sub-regions, as well as at the southern end of the Redwood South sub-region.

Use the slider on the following two maps to switch between viewing the sub-regional fuels reduction treatment priority ranking and either the disadvantaged communities layer or the aboveground live carbon layer. For the disadvantaged communities map, the general patterns of overlap between disadvantaged communities and modeled high-priority mechanical treatment areas are similar to those in the regional version. However, the sub-regional version highlights additional areas of overlap in the coastal sub-regions, particularly in the inland portions of these sub-regions. The aboveground carbon map also illustrates similar overall patterns to the regional version, with the addition of a few areas of overlap between high predicted mechanical treatment priority and high aboveground carbon in the inland parts of the coastal sub-regions.

An important existing analysis that shares many similarities with the Forest Health Pilot Regional Assessment outlined above is the CAL FIRE Fire and Resource Assessment Program's Priority Landscapes. This assessment was completed in 2018 and produced a series of four interactive maps that can be accessed through  this web application . Maps are available for the following Priority Landscapes themes:

• Reduce Wildfire Risk to Forest Ecosystem Services
• Reduce Wildfire Risk to Communities
• Restore Pest and Drought Damaged Areas
• Restore Fire Damaged Forests

In addition to the maps that depict analysis results, the application includes maps related to two critical co-benefits: priority populations (including disadvantaged and low-income communities) and community wildfire risk by fire preparedness plan type.

The CAL FIRE Priority Landscapes and the NCRP Forest Health Pilot Regional Assessment are fundamentally built around similar categories. Both assessments incorporate data related to burn severity, wildfire risk to communities, pest/mortality damage, and disadvantaged communities. In spite of these parallels, there are several important differences between the two assessments.

The first major difference is related to spatial resolution. The Priority Landscapes analyses were conducted at various spatial scales, with some results provided at a more granular scale. For example, the Priority Landscapes evaluation that prioritizes treatment areas for reducing wildfire risk to forest ecosystem services was conducted at the watershed level. In contrast, NCRP's assessment is entirely 30-meter pixel-based. The latter approach offers the advantage of allowing for suitability to be evaluated at the project level.

The Priority Landscapes "Reduce Wildfire Risk to Forest Ecosystem Services" analysis explicitly considers assets in the categories of carbon, timber, site quality, large trees, and surface water in its overall scoring. NCRP's assessment, on the other hand, does not include these asset values, focusing instead on threats to forest health and communities as well as mechanical treatment feasibility.

Because NCRP's assessment was completed recently, it uses more current data than the Priority Landscapes assessment for a number of inputs. Although the "Restore Fire Damaged Forests" and "Priority Populations" Priority Landscape maps were revised in December 2022, most of the maps are based on data last updated in 2018, whereas most of the input datasets in NCRP's analyses are updated through 2021 or 2022.

Priority Landscape’s "Reduce Wildfire Risk to Forest Ecosystem Services" theme excludes non-conifer lands, while NCRP’s assessment includes all woody vegetation.

The NCRP CAL FIRE Forest Health Pilot Regional Assessment is part of  California Climate Investments , a statewide initiative that puts billions of Cap-and-Trade dollars to work reducing greenhouse gas emissions, strengthening the economy, and improving public health and the environment — particularly in disadvantaged communities.