Wildfires are a major concern in the Tri-Counties.
The Thomas, Woolsey, Jesusita, and Tea fires have taken lives and burned thousands of homes in the region. A new tool developed by a UC Santa Barbara research center lets you find out how wildfire resilient your community is.
"The Wildfire Resilience Index is a holistic measure of landscape resilience designed to capture the values that we have in our landscapes," said Cat Long, lead researcher with the Wildlife Resilience Index.
The tool was developed by researchers at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara. They worked with experts around the world on the three-year project.
"Wildfires are a growing concern among the public and policymakers. There are a lot of existing tools out there, and a lot of them are really focused on what we call wildfire hazard, or the probability that a wildfire will happen in any given location," said Fong. "What makes this index a little bit different is we're really focused on the consequences of what would the system behave like if a wildfire were to occur. So, it's not if it's likely there's going to be a wildfire, but how will the system perform in terms of resilience, which we define as the ability to resist negative impacts, or recover afterward."
The index looks at ecological and social wildfire resilience. You can use the map to check resilience in your community.
Fong explained the criteria that were examined to create the scores.
"We came up with eight social-ecological domains that we think capture the things that people care about. Those domains are infrastructure, communities, livelihoods, sense of place, species, habitat, water, and air. So, once we had those eight domains constructed, we had to populate those domains with indicators that we thought would be reflective of system performance in terms of resilience. From there, it was doing a lot of literature (scientific paper) reviews, and thinking what it is we really care about."
Fong explained the number on the scale and what they mean.
"We scaled all of these indicators from zero to 100. Zero is the worst, and 100 is the best. We did that for about 100 different indicators that are rolled up into this single score that captures resilience."
The index covers the western United States and parts of Canada and Alaska. Fong said our region's score shows the need for improvement.
"I try really hard not to equate this to a report card. even though I think that's how a lot of people internalize it. Everyone wants an 'A.' If you look across the landscape, there aren't that many places that are in the 90 to 100 range. The average score for the WRI is '73.' What that means to me, because I live in Santa Barbara, is that I want to find areas of improvement. Any deviation from 100 means you have potential to improve."
Many of the WRI numbers for the Central and South Coasts are in the 70s.
Fong added that researchers discovered communities are often much better at wildfire recovery than wildfire preparation. With nearly 100 datasets involved, they look at the index as an evolving resource that will need to be updated regularly.
The hope is that people and communities will use the tool as a resource to look at strengths and weaknesses and make improvements to improve wildfire resiliency.
