Our recent partnership with the Illinois Valley Fire Resiliency Oversight Group saw us applying advanced GIS tools in collaboration with local community knowledge to promote wildfire resilience and preparedness in Josephine County, Oregon. Through this partnership, we developed a series of maps that provided critical insights into wildfire dynamics and recovery in the area.

   To construct these maps, we used a large number of data resources available to us, including: an NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) analysis to assess vegetation health, historical wind data studies to predict fire spread, the University of Oregon's qualitative wildfire risk assessment, local fire history maps, evaluations of post-fire severity using published BARC (Burned Area Reflectance Classification) and BEAR (Burned Area Emergency Response) report data, and IFTDSS (Interagency Fuel Treatment Decision Support System) to simulate the effectiveness of hypothetical prescribed burn operations in reducing fire risk.

   In addition to creating these maps, we hosted a collaborative meeting at the Illinois Valley Fire Department, which brought stakeholders together from across the local area to discuss how to interpret and utilize these maps most effectively. Our approach merged data-driven insights with community engagement, ensuring that the maps we created would provide a pathway towards better-informed wildfire danger mitigation in the future.