FAQs
What is Planscape?
Planscape is a new wildfire resilience planning tool designed to bring the best available state and federal data and science together in a user-friendly, accessible format. Planscape will help regional planners prioritize landscape treatments to mitigate fire risk, maximize ecological benefits and help California’s landscapes adapt to climate change.
Open source and free to use, for state and federal planers as well as the public
Landscape scale, to support regional planning for fire resilience and ecological benefits
Designed to utilize the regional resource kits as the primary data source
Built to take advantage of the best state and federal science and models
Who is working on Planscape?
California Natural Resources Agency (CNRA) is collaborating with a cross-functional team of Google employees, as part of a Google.org Fellowship, to build Planscape. The Google.org team has been working with scientists from the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force and analysts from the USDA Forest Service.
We’re utilizing an analytics framework that was developed specifically to work with data from the regional resource kits and to reflect the 10 pillars, so that planners can look at how to manage not only the lands around the wildland/urban interface, but also plan to optimize for the environment by measuring project impact on carbon sequestration, watersheds and wildlife. We are also working with analysts to incorporate the ability to estimate optimal projects within a planning area, including treatment cost and acreage coverage.
The CNRA & Google.org Team has been working closely with members of the science advisory panel and task force who have been building California’s wildfire and forest resilience action plan, and the regional resource kits, to ensure that the tool is supported by the most recent science and utilizes the newest data sets.
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.
Will Planscape and associated data/models be available for all of California?
The Regional Resource Kits (RRKs), the foundational data source for Planscape, will be rolling out over the course of 2023 and enable state-wide use of the tool. Availability and timelines of Regional Resource Kits can be found on the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force site. After RRKs are published for a given region, availability for that region in Planscape will usually follow within a quarter.
When will Planscape be available for use?
CNRA expects to have a first version of Planscape ready for public use in Spring of 2023. This launch of the tool will include data and science to enable planning in the Sierras. We will be rolling the tool out to the other three regions (SoCal, North Coast, Central Coast) as those regional resource kits become available. The tool is designed to be able to easily ingest the new kits.