Sonoma County Wildfire Resilience Decision Support Framework

The Sonoma County Decision Support Framework (DSF) is an integrated set of tools that operate at the parcel and landscape scales to enable strategic investments in fuel load reduction, vegetation management, community health and safety and the long-term resilience of Sonoma County watersheds.

To develop the most responsive and effective tool possible, Sonoma Water contracted Ag Innovations to conduct a User Needs Assessment for the Wildfire Resilience Planner, an online landscape-scale vegetation management prioritization tool. The goal of the User Needs Assessment was to better understand the interests, needs, challenges, and aspirations of a broad, community-wide range of potential users in and around Sonoma County. The User Needs Assessment results have been used to inform the development of decision-support resources such as the Wildfire Resilience Planner. This tool provides landowners and land managers with a set of tools, resources, and information to help reduce fire hazards, manage fuels and protect people, ecosystems, and infrastructure.

Learn more about Sonoma County DSF

Sonoma County Wildlife Resilience Planner

Ag Innovations Project Team

ROBERT GOULD
Senior Facilitator

BRIDGET LOWRY
Project Manager

USER NEEDS ASSESSMENT

The DSF User Needs Assessment targeted interviewees who were primarily potential users whose work includes and/or intersects with landscape-scale wildfire-related interests, including prevention and risk mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery; a secondary focus was stakeholder groups that could impact or be impacted by wildfire, including water and energy utilities, roads and transportation, tourism and hospitality, risk managers and insurance agencies, and healthcare. Ag Innovations sent out interview requests to 63 individuals, and in total conducted 21 interviews with 39 individuals representing over 30 organizations. Read the full summary report to learn about key results and implications of this assessment.

THE WILDFIRE RESILIENCE PLANNER

The Wildlife Resilience Planner is an online spatially explicit landscape-scale wildfire risk reduction and vegetation management planning and prioritization tool. This tool supports and is integrated with the Wildfire Fuel Mapper, an online tool developed by the University of California Cooperative Extension, Pepperwood Preserve, and Tukman Geospatial. This tool was developed by Sonoma Water, Conservation Biology Institute (CBI), Pepperwood Preserve, Tukman Geospatial, Digital Mapping Solutions, and Ag Innovations.

This was a project of the Sonoma County Water Agency (SonomaWater) and the University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE), authorized by the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors.