Secure, stabilize, and restore

After a wildfire, addressing rehabilitation needs is critical to reopening a community and avoiding cascading consequences. Vegetation, slope, and other landscape information can be combined with information on community infrastructure to identify rehabilitation locations that need emergency stabilization efforts as well as those that require long-term restoration projects. Staff can analyze imagery to determine where fires burned more intensely, where substantial rehabilitation is required to support the future of the forest, and where postincident runoff might result in erosion or even catastrophic failure.

Apply location analytics to rehabilitation

Hazardous material and debris removal

The process of documenting and managing the removal of debris after a wildfire is a difficult but necessary procedure for recovery and rehabilitation. With GIS, you can collect locations of debris and hazardous materials (hazmat), analyze exposure zones when needed, and plan and distribute resources where they are needed most in the community. Using maps and dashboards, you can monitor and evaluate recovery indicators while providing transparency to elected officials and the public as the recovery progresses.

Fire damage inspection map and a photo of a burned vehicle

Environmental stabilization

Burn severity is the degree of change to the watershed and soil function caused by a wildland fire. Using GIS and imagery, GIS specialists can analyze the burn severity to identify areas of greatest change. These areas can be targeted with postfire rehabilitation measures and stabilization efforts to safeguard further impacts as a result to the destabilization of the forest floor. Deploy field teams with GIS tools they can use to collect information on the ground and empower them to refine plans in place and provide communications to the community about long-term rehabilitation.

Map of soil burn severity and photo of an arid mountain

Long-term recovery and restoration

The need for rehabilitation following a wildfire does not diminish immediately after the fire is contained. It can take decades for the burned area to recover and the soil to stabilize. When fire teams map and monitor the changes over time using GIS, they can develop and modify recovery plans and manage these efforts long term.

Forest map of change detection and photo of burned trees

case study

Location analytics supports wildfire relief

Direct Relief chose ArcGIS Insights for data analysis and population tracking during the 2018 Camp Fire in California's Butte County.

Read the case study

Solutions for wildland fire rehabilitation

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