Description: This dataset is the Risk to Potential Structures (RPS) for California. It is part of the Wildfire Risk to Communities: Spatial datasets of landscape-wide wildfire risk components for the United States. RPS is a measure that integrates wildfire likelihood and intensity with generalized consequences to a home on every pixel. For every place on the landscape, it poses the hypothetical question, "What would be the relative risk to a house if one existed here?" This allows comparison of wildfire risk in places where homes already exist to places where new construction may be proposed. This dataset is referred to as Risk to Homes in the Wildfire Risk to Communities web application. Vegetation and wildland fuels data from LANDFIRE 2014 (version 1.4.0) form the foundation for the Wildfire Risk to Communities data. As such, the data presented here reflect landscape conditions as of the end of 2014. National wildfire hazard datasets of annual burn probability and fire intensity were generated from the LANDFIRE 2014 data by the USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station (Short et al. 2020) using the large fire simulation system (FSim). These national datasets produced with FSim have a relatively coarse cell size of 270 meters (m). To bring these datasets down to a finer resolution more useful for assessing hazard and risk to communities, we upsampled them to the native 30 m resolution of the LANDFIRE fuel and vegetation data. In this upsampling process, we also spread values of modeled burn probability and intensity into developed areas represented in LANDFIRE fuels data as non-burnable. Additional methodology documentation is provided with the data publication download.
Service Item Id: 0f204c8c4fcd4a8e8ef9b4fade05ea84
Copyright Text: Funding for this project provided by USDA Forest Service, Fire and Aviation Management. Funding also provided by USDA Forest Service, Fire Modeling Institute, which is part of the Rocky Mountain Research Station, Fire, Fuel and Smoke Science Program. Work on dataset development was primarily completed by Pyrologix, LLC under contract with the USDA Forest Service, Fire Modeling Institute.