Addressing WUI Wildfire Buffer Gaps
The communities throughout Santa Barbara County have varying degrees of wildfire buffer along their WUI edges. Goleta benefits from significant portions of its WUI edged by irrigated orchards, and Montecito has some protected WUI properties like the Hot Springs parcels acquired and protected by the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County that allow fire prevention work at scale above the interface. Some fire protection districts with high tax bases like Montecito have extensive programs to create a nearly continuous band of community defensible space through an array of programs from roadside chipping to vegetation management on private lands in partnership with property owners. Given the range of resources available to different agencies and the scopes of their mandates, the potential for creating and maintaining programs like these is not yet well understood or mapped. This project would systematically identify the potential to create these kinds of buffers through a wide variety of approaches in areas of high priority for fire prevention. In addition to the methods described above, buffers can be created through land protection (via voluntary acquisition of land or conservation easements to prevent development in the WUI while creating space where agencies can create and maintain buffers), planting orchards or other crops where water can made available, introducing fire-resistant landscape elements, restoring natural buffers such as oak woodland and more. A portion of a recent grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to the California Fire Safe Council for the "Regional Wildfire Mitigation Program" is being administered by SIG-NAL to implement a Landscape Domain Initiative that will undertake extensive GIS work and outreach to better understand existing and potential buffers and approaches to achieving them. Environmental Defense Center recommended approaching this need in a variety of ways in its report on improving wildfire resilience and ecosystem health in the Goleta Valley (see report referenced here). Additionally a new research initiative at UCSB is adding further research capacity and mapping that may aid in the identification of buffering needs, though that initiative is still take shape. Understanding how these various projects are and are not identifying specific gaps in buffers around communities is a high priority, as is coordinating across these efforts to avoid duplication of effort and to ensure real world applicability.
The RPP SDSS is the Spatial Decision Support System for Wildfire Risk Reduction and can be viewed here.
Status: Partially Funded (Portions of this work may be underway in several dispersed efforts as noted. Coordination is needed.)
Cost: High
Partners: Land Trust for Santa Barbara County, California Rangeland Trust Landowners, Trust for Public Land, Local Agency Formation Commissions (LAFCOs)
Funding Sources: To be determined on a site-specific basis.
Permitting: Site-specific assessment would be required. Permits may be needed if considered an intensification of land use (such as grazing to orchard) in the Coastal Zone. Some land use changes are considered intensification and would require a Coastal Development Permit.
Additional Notes: Additional mapping is underway to assess details in potential landscape-level treatments as part of the NFWF grant awarded to SIGNAL as part of the "Landscape Domain" of the project.
Spatial Analysis:
This map is exploring WUI areas along with other key widlfire risk and cropland factors. To view, zoom, and interactive with this map, please click here to open the link in a new tab.
This map is exploring WUI areas along with other key widlfire risk and cropland factors. To view, zoom, and interactive with this map, please click here to open the link in a new tab.