Assessing and Mitigating Fire Risk for Landowners
in the Southern Wildland-Urban Interface
Project objective
To prepare a set of guidelines that provide southern
landowners with the ability to assess and mitigate their particular risk of
fire and to evaluate their options for designing fire-safe landscapes.
To achieve this broad objective, various specific tasks were organized under the following subprojects:
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| Fire Risks in Southern Interface Landscapes | |
| To successfully mitigate fire risk, landowners must be able to identify key characteristics of their surrounding landscape that contribute to high fire hazard conditions. Once hazardous conditions are identified, landowners need information on how to modify and maintain their landscapes to make them fire-resistant. In 2001, a multi-year study was initiated to identify landscape characteristics that make homes vulnerable to fire by visiting homes that were exposed to wildfire. Immediately after a fire, the landscaping around individual homes are surveyed to examine the relationship between structural damage and landscaping. The post-fire assessments characterize landscape design features (including area of defensible space, spatial arrangement of plants, mulch use, etc.), and specific plants species (an assessment of their presence and resistance to fire). The surrounding wildland vegetation is also characterized for each residential community. The first year project report (linked below) includes a literature review on structural survival during wildfires, a progress report on the post-fire assessment study, and a section defining the major vegetation communities in the interface of the southern United States. | |
Ranking Plant Species by Flammability in the Southern United States |
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| Recommendations for ‘fire-safe’ landscaping include reducing the number of flammable plants on property and planting species that are less flammable. However, distributed lists that rank species by flammability frequently have an unknown origin. In other cases, species lists are generated from data originating from widely different ecosystems. Knowledge of the relative flammability of both native and exotic ornamental plants in the southern United States would be useful to interface landowners, landscape architects, extension agents, and nurseries. In addition, quantification of flammability characteristics of plants can contribute to the development of more ecosystem-specific models of fire behavior. | |
Landowner Risk Assessment |
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| A set of specific guidelines are being developed for landowners to assess their fire risk.The guidelines will be applicable to different audiences across the southern United States and suitable for different technology transfer venues. The southern interface landscapes that are described in the report-in-progress for subproject 1 will be included in these assessment guidelines. Before developing the guidelines, existing guidelines and other fire risk assessment and mitigation documents for landowners were compiled and evaluated. The following report-in-progress summarizes the various existing methods and outlines the key components of the new risk assessment procedures being developed through this project. Assessments procedures will incorporate components of existing systems, as well as information from the current research (both from this project and other related projects). A draft form of the proposed fire risk assessment system will be distributed among regional fire professionals for critical review during 2003. | |
Fuel Reduction Options for Landowners |
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| Reducing the amount of vegetative fuels in interface areas is an important component of most wildfire hazard mitigation plans. Fuel reduction programs implemented by the government often target large tracts of wildlands, and their techniques are well developed. However, using such techniques on small parcels of lands or on land in the wildland-urban interface presents unique challenges for individual landowners. This report provides a synopsis of fuel management options for small landowners (chemical, mechanical, fire, biological) and reviews their effectiveness and associated costs. In addition to a comprehensive literature review, this subproject involves a small research study.Using permanent plots, the study compares the costs and effectiveness of three fuel management options for small landowners: mechanical, prescribed fire, and herbicide.Other research projects will provide additional information to be incorporated in the final report. | |
