FAQs
What is Planscape?
Planscape is a wildfire resilience decision support tool for planners designed to bring the best available state and federal data and science together in a user-friendly, accessible format.
Planscape helps regional planners prioritize landscape treatments to mitigate fire risk, maximize ecological benefits, and help California’s landscapes adapt to climate change.
Why was Planscape created?
In August 2020, Governor Newsom signed the Shared Stewardship Agreement with the US Forest Service, mapping out a 20-year, science-based strategy to achieve wildfire resilience and forest health. This commitment included a goal of jointly improving 1 million acres of California’s forest and wildlands annually by 2025. This is 4x the 250,000 acres treated annually today.
However extensive user experience research identified that one of the top issues facing planners was the ability to prioritize treatments at a regional level.
While state and federal scientists are developing a wide array of data sets and tools to advance wildfire resilience, they don’t easily interact with one another, and often require experts to run meaningful analytics with them. Regional land planners need a user-friendly platform to plan wildfire resilience projects that not only mitigate fire risk, but also maximize ecological benefits – watershed health, biodiversity, carbon storage and help California’s landscapes adapt to climate change.
Planscape aims to help planners meet that challenge.
Who can use Planscape?
Planscape is open to the public and free for anyone to use.
Planscape will focus on regional planners as the primary users (and local planners as secondary users), with the goal of helping them identify and prioritize the most valuable resilience treatments across California’s wildlands.
Why use Planscape?
To strategically plan resilience treatments in forested and chaparral landscapes across California.
To leverage the full potential of the Pillars of Resilience, which provide a robust framework to assess and communicate the benefits and impacts of potential projects.
To increase collaboration by allowing users to select proposed actions based on their own preferences and then share and contrast results with the proposed actions of others.
What are the benefits of Planscape?
Free and open source, providing transparency on scientific models and data sources to all users
Built by and for the State of CA (with support from private industry, including Google.org and SIG)
Built to take advantage of the best available science, data and models
Designed to utilize the Regional Resource Kits, as the primary data sets intended to support landscape scale evaluation and planning
Future focused via the incorporation of climate change science and models
Incorporates a holistic view of resilience – based on a scientific framework that calculates resilience based on 10 pillars, to address the full array of objectives in the action plan
Integrates existing projects so they can be viewed alongside new project planning
Collaboration functionality will enable users to easily share plans and exchange feedback, best practices, and more
What US states are currently covered by Planscape?
Planscape uses data from Regional Resource Kits, which primarily cover California. There may be data that shows for boundary states, such as around the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe, however that data may be incomplete and not provide enough information for accurate planning.
What regions does Planscape cover?
Planscape will cover four regions in California:
Sierra Nevada
Southern California
Central Coast
North Coast California
Note: The early release version will provide access to the Explore feature for the Sierra Nevada region (normalized data)
Who is working on Planscape?
Planscape is a collaboration of the California Natural Resources Agency, the USDA Forest Service, the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force, University of California and others, with pro bono support from Google.org Fellows and Spatial Informatics Group (SIG).
What data does Planscape use?
The data that Planscape uses is based on California's Regional Resource Kits, developed by the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force. You can find more detailed information about these here.
What framework does Planscape use?
Planscape uses an analytics framework developed specifically to work with data from the regional resources kits and to reflect the 10 pillars of resilience that have been expanded beyond the Tahoe-Central Sierra Initiative (TCSI) and adapted for regional needs statewide.
This allows planners to:
Manage the lands around the wildland/urban interface
Optimize for the environment by measuring project impact on carbon sequestration, watersheds, and wildlife
Estimate optimal projects within a planning area - including treatment cost and acreage coverage
When will Planscape be available for use?
The early release version of Planscape will provide access to the Explore feature in Spring of 2023. The early release version will only include the Sierra Nevada region (normalized data).
The remaining California regions (Southern California, Central Coast, and North Coast) will be rolling out in subsequent phases. All California regions should be available by late 2023.
What devices and browsers are supported by Planscape?
Since Planscape is a web-based tool, it is recommended to run on the following:
Devices: Planscape works best on desktops and laptops. It is not designed for use on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
Browsers: Planscape works on most popular web browsers such as Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox.