OOS 28-1
The impact of private land conservation on fire risk in the wildland-urban-interface: A case study in San Diego County, CA
Increasing numbers of homes are being destroyed by wildfire in the wildland-urban interface. With projections of climate change and housing growth potentially exacerbating the threat of wildfire to homes and property, effective fire-risk reduction alternatives are needed as part of a comprehensive fire management plan. A potentially overlooked policy for mitigating the impacts of wildfire in the WUI is the conservation of private land. Private land conservation may impact fire frequency and fire risk in multiple ways. Conserving land may reduce fire ignitions and also increase the flexibility of fuel and fire management regimes. Conserving land may also impact fire risk because it impacts the arrangement of houses in the larger WUI. By reducing potential areas of housing development, land conservation may increase housing densities on non-conserved land which can reduce fire risk. Here we use an integrated model of land subdivision, conservation, and fire risk to simulate the impact of land conservation on fire frequency and fire houses in San Diego County CA. We simulate multiple scenarios representing different levels of housing growth, different conservation budgets, and different development types.
Results/Conclusions
Our preliminary results suggests heterogeneous and scale dependent impacts of land conservation on reducing fire risk. On one hand, by taking land out of develop, we do see increased density of new houses in our subdivision model, and this does lead to decreased fire risk for new developments. However, at the scale of the county this impact is quite small. Conserved properties also directly reduce fire risk relative to low density housing. This risk reduction is strongest for structures closest to conserved parcels. Overall, land conservation may be a useful tool for reducing fire risk at the local level, although at the scale of a county it may have limited impacts.