February updates ⏩

• Planscape is a free decision support tool built to maximize wildfire resilience and ecological benefits across the State of California. 
• Planscape helps regional planners prioritize landscape treatments to mitigate fire risk, maximize ecological benefits, and help California’s landscapes adapt to climate change
• Planscape is a collaborative effort by the California Natural Resources Agency, the USDA Forest Service, The University of California, The USDA Climate Hubs, and Spatial Informatics Group (SIG) with support from Google.org 

New Partner! 🪇 

We’re delighted to welcome the USDA Climate Hub to the Planscape Cooperative. The team, based out of UC Davis, brings a new depth of scientific knowledge and rigor to the team. They will be focused on user engagement, running workshops, training upcoming instructors, and more. Last week, they designed and delivered a workshop in Northern California, focused on the Klamath River Basin and Shasta Trinity crisis strategy landscapes. A warm welcome to Steve, Jen, Jess and colleagues!

Cut! 📽️

It’s Oscar season, and the new Planscape video is award eligible. Enjoy your own private viewing here. If you're wondering how to get started with Planscape, this is the best place to start. Please share!

New Case Study! - UMRWA 🔍

The Planscape Cooperative is honored to be working with the Upper Mokelumne River Watershed Authority (UMRWA) in California’s Sierra Nevada on the Forest Projects Plan (FPP), Phase 2. FPP is a large-landscape forest and ecosystem health partnership effort between UMRWA and the USDA FS located on the Eldorado National Forest, Amador Ranger District and the Stanislaus National Forest, Calaveras Ranger District in and immediately adjacent to the Upper Mokelumne River watershed. The Planscape Cooperative is working collaboratively with UMRWA to produce a 10-year plan to increase wildfire and ecological resilience in and adjacent to the watershed within the approximately 260,000-acre project area. Read more about the work here.

How are we different? 

We're often asked how Planscape is different. We've summarized below, and expanded here.

Free

Planscape is free (and always will be) for anyone to use through a web browser. Our goal is to democratize the best data and science to help anyone and everyone make the best planning decisions.

Open Source

Planscape code is openly available for anyone to use, with a public-domain, no-copyright license. 

We welcome collaborators. Reach out if you’d like to contribute.

The science and models used by Planscape are transparent. There is no ‘black box’. We build easy-to-use interfaces, so you don’t need to be an expert to enter your goals and constraints or to understand the results – and we’re always transparent about how our models work.

Built on the best peer-reviewed science, we are not developing new science – Planscape brings best-of-breed tools like ForSys, FVS, Gridfire, Treemap, PROMOTe, and others in an easy-to-use tool through a web browser. Though these tools are available and open, they can require significant investment in learning - the Planscape platform makes them accessible to all. Reach out if you think we’re missing tools or models that should be incorporated.

Planscape ingests hundreds of scientifically approved data layers. The sources, descriptions, and vintages of each are transparently provided. Users can download any data layers used in Planscape.

Planscape is governed by USFS, the State of California, The California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Taskforce, the University of California, Google.org, and others. No entity has commercial ownership of Planscape, or profits from its success. We welcome new members of the Planscape cooperative. 

We believe we can’t achieve wildfire, ecological, watershed, or other resilience without considering the pressures of climate change. By building in future-facing models, we help planners understand where best to apply efforts today.

Let's connect 💬

We welcome collaborators of many kinds

• Planners wanting to use Planscape. Let us know if you’d like to schedule a demo or walk through
• Developers who would like to contribute to the project
• Government agencies or NGOs who would like to help shape the direction of the project