Community Wildfire Protection Plan

Community Basemap VI-A

As part of the Community Wildfire Protection Plan, a basemap of Summit County was needed to better understand the layout and property ownership of the county. The Community Basemap VI-A map shows an aerial image of the county with U.S. Forest Service lands; wilderness, town, and basin boundaries; and roads and trails centerlines. The main use for this map is to see the different vegetation zones, density of homes in an area, and the road networks throughout the county. By using the basemap in conjunction with the risk assessment, the wildfire council was able to make better decisions about where the focus of the treatment efforts needed to be.

Step 5 Community Risk Assessment

With the increase in the risk of wildfires in Summit County, Colorado, a wildfire protection plan became necessary to identify areas where the risk of wildfire to homes and other community infrastructure is the greatest and to work with homeowners in these identified areas to reduce that risk. To identify these areas, GIS was used to compile various data into one risk assessment for the county.

The Step 5 Community Risk Assessment maps show the GIS analysis of step 5 in the Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP). The National Association of Counties developed the CWPP model. Esri and the Colorado State Forest Service created the data model for step 5. The model has five components that are used to generate the final output: fuel hazards, risk of wildfire occurrence, essential infrastructures at risk, community values at risk, and local preparedness and firefighting capabilities. These steps are merged using a weighted overlay analysis where all five parts are given a percent of influence. The output, wildfire protection assessment, is divided into four categories—low, medium, high, and extreme—to show the overall conditions in Summit County, Colorado. U.S. Forest Service Dillon Ranger District and Summit County government prepared data for the model.