Who needs a fire management plan?

NTFI develops fire management plans that help landowners to live safely with wildfire. We help clients ranging from homeowners to owners of large, timbered properties to understand the hazards that they face, and provide them with solutions that lower their exposure to fire losses. Among our staff, we can call upon hundreds of years of collective experience in wildfire management, forestry, fuels reduction, logging and ranching. Our team members have developed Fire Management Plans for both Federal and private parties.

Fire Management Planning Process

• Satellite imagery and aerial photography
• Fire history databases and historic fire maps
• Tree-ring studies of fire history in the project area
• Ground-based fuel mapping/surveys
• GIS landscape analysis tools
• Interviews with knowledgeable local individuals

• Identify assets at risk and steps necessary to protect these assets
• Improve fire suppression response and firefighter safety
• Identify fuel reduction and habitat restoration opportunities
• Integrate wildfire management with other land management objectives

• Reduced insurance premiums
• Reduced infrastructure losses/property damage during wildfires
• Reduced risk of resource damage from fire and fire suppression
• Increased peace of mind during fire season
• Better access to land management tools such as Wildland Fire Use
• Better integration of fire into general land management activities
• Facilitation of prescribed burning activities
• Improved wildlife habitat on both private and adjacent public lands.
• Increased likelihood of receiving grants to do habitat restoration

Community Wildfire Protection Planning

Community wildfire protection plans (CWPP) are a component of the 2003 Healthy Forests Initiative. Funding agencies such as FEMA are beginning to use these plans to set priorities for funding wildfire prevention work such as Hazardous Fuels Reduction. Counties and cities that have completed this process are in a better position to compete for hazard reduction grants. NTFI-GIS has been involved in CWPP efforts including hazardous fuel mapping and fuel reduction project design for communities in the Lake Tahoe Basin, and in the the co-development of the Plumas County Hazardous Fuel Assessment & Strategy. This project is an integral component of the Plumas County Fire Plan.

For more information on the Plumas County Hazardous Fuel Assessment, visit our Fire Modeling page.

NorthTree Fire has experience developing background data for the FEMA Benefit-Cost Analysis (BCA) process, and provides technical consulting on wildfire hazard mitigation and fuel reduction grant proposals.

Other Planning/GIS Services

NorthTree Fire staff can provide services including:

• Watershed Analysis
• Wildland Fire Risk/Insurance Suitability
• Oblique Aerial Photography and Interpretation
• Prescribed Fire Planning
• Postfire Damage Assessment
• Vegetation/Fuels Mapping
• Wildland Fire Management Planning
• Environmental Planning/Project Management
• Vegetation Management Project Design
• Fire Program Assessment
• Emergency Response Planning

Other examples of NTFI pre-fire planning projects include: the Lassen Foothills Fire Management Plan for 85,000 acres of Nature Conservancy land in Northern California, and Fire Management Plans for the 50,000 acre Morro Bay Estuary watershed, and the Palo Corona Regional Park, on the California Central Coast. Additionally, NTFI used GIS analysis to develop a fuels management budget-plan for 35 million acres of public lands administered by the Nevada BLM.