Bridging the Gap Between Policy and Communities

While projects like the interagency tracking system and forest data hub will integrate essential data to inform resilience initiatives, CWI also recognizes that that information needs to reach those on the ground in a meaningful, scalable and sustainable way.

Our Regional Resource Kits project aims to connect essential data to boots-on-the-ground; we will utilize and integrate existing science to inform resilience metrics, and relay these metrics to land managers through resource kits. Evaluating and developing these metrics will be a collaborative effort on the part of academic institutions and state and federal land agencies. Researchers will consider a variety of existing metrics for forest resilience and wildfire reduction and distill them down to those most relevant and valuable at the community level.

Team leads will work closely with regional partners to understand what data, information, analysis tools, and models already exist, with the ultimate goal of integrating local and regional knowledge and avoiding duplication. The kits themselves will serve as a conduit to communities that are most at risk of wildfire impacts and will aid land managers in continuing to plan and prioritize treatment projects that will have the most significant impact on community resilience.

Read more and access the kits here:

California Wildfire Wildfire and Forest Resilience Taskforce

Project Lead: John Battles, professor of Forest Ecology, Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management—UC Berkeley