Placerville Case Study

Case Study: Using Planscape to Advance Wildfire Resilience in Placerville

In Placerville, California, Planscape helped turn wildfire planning into action. By uniting community knowledge with advanced modeling, local partners used Planscape to identify 60,000 acres of priority treatments, secure $10 million in CAL FIRE funding, and launch an on-the-ground resilience strategy that’s now shaping how other regions plan for wildfire. This project shows how Planscape empowers communities to plan smarter, collaborate openly, and build lasting resilience.

Project Overview

The Placerville Wildfire Resilience Strategy is a landmark project in El Dorado County, California, focused on protecting the community and surrounding landscapes. As is typical for Planscape users and projects, a broad collaborative group came together to seek increased wildfire resilience. Funded by the Sierra Nevada Conservancy and led by the El Dorado RCD, with engineering support from WSP and domain expertise from Spatial Informatics Group (SIG), the initiative covers an ~80,000-acre treatment area enveloping the Highway 50 corridor between Placerville and Pollock Pines. Given that the surrounding area had recently experienced wildfires, there was an urgent need to develop a strategy to protect Placerville from a similar outcome.

Project Goal

The project aimed to enhance community wildfire resiliency through a focused initiative, similar to a Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP). This plan included specific and detailed treatment strategies, subdividing a landscape-scale fire hazard reduction strategy to streamline and expedite the implementation of on-the-ground fire mitigation treatments.

Approach and Methodology

The project team integrated technical GIS modeling with applied planning by collating and mapping extensive treatment records from community organizations, utilities, and government agencies. This systematic approach allowed for the incorporation of existing treatments into a coordinated, multi-pronged plan.

An important part of this methodology was the use of previous reports including much of their analyses, language, and suggestions for planning efforts. For example, the Greater Placerville Wildfire Evacuation Preparedness, Community Safety & Resilience Study was used to outline the study area and proved several worst-case wildfire scenarios that could severely impact the built environment. The research team aimed to efficiently address the wildlife issue in western forests by utilizing the most effective components of existing reports and plans, rather than developing an entirely new approach. This primarily included:

Manual Suitability Modeling: Prioritized treatments using ArcGIS Suitability Modeler based on slope, road access, risky subdivision egress, flame length, and utility corridors. These layers are now available on Planscape.
Treatment Design: Developed “onion-style” layers of protection, starting from Placerville’s city center and extending outward. Treatments were organized in temporal tiers, with re-treatments every 7–10 years, focusing efforts where most needed and gradually expanding outward.
Data Collection: Identified active, completed, and planned projects, as well as those targeted for retreatment, by compiling stakeholder data to understand the history and status of area treatments.

Such efforts, combined with SIG’s novel approach to mapping and assessing risk in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), identified areas offering the most immediate and long-term improvements, prioritizing those that provide the greatest benefit per investment.

How Planscape Was Used

The team then leveraged Planscape to validate and enhance the more traditional, manual model. The research team concentrated on areas where their interventions could be most effective without overlapping with existing U.S. Forest Service (USFS) activities by narrowing in on private and local lands–USFS lands were already addressed in parallel efforts.

Planscape planning is an iterative process and was used to confirm results derived from the initial suitability model. These were the final criteria ran in Planscape:

Fuel load reduction opportunities
High severity fire areas
Reduced WUI fire risk
60,000 acres of suitable treatment areas: slopes ≤45°, within 450 yards of roads, ≤10-acre stand size

Results & Outcomes

The Planscape treatment outputs confirmed and augmented priority treatment areas by showing a strong overlap with the 12 locations identified in the manual suitability analysis and illustrating novel ways to connect those treatments. Additionally, manual adjustments were made for local nuances, like Weber Creek and the Jawbone neighborhood, as they were recognized as high priority by local stakeholders, including fire chiefs–emphasizing that local expertise is invaluable to such a process.

Maps were provided to community members to mark areas of concern, which were cross-checked in the suitability analysis. Happily, the project’s analysis accurately addressed community concerns, thereby bolstering the credibility and acceptance of the project outcomes within the community.

Figure 2: Map 1 – displaying Planscape reduced risk in WUI.

Figure 3: Map 2 – displaying Map 1 overlaid with Tier 1 treatments from suitability model and manual treatments.

Figure 4: Map 3 – displaying Tier 1 treatments from suitability model and manual treatments.

Placerville Wildfire Resilience Strategy

Check out the Placerville Wildfire Resilience Strategy to see how strong partnerships and community collaboration helped guide the city’s wildfire treatment plans.

Figure 5: Final map of the Placerville Project Study Treatments from the Placerville Wildfire Resilience Strategy website.

Broader Impact

The Placerville Wildfire Resilience Strategy showcases how Planscape transforms wildfire planning from complex analysis into coordinated community action. By combining local knowledge with advanced modeling, the team used Planscape to identify and prioritize 60,000 acres of fuel reduction opportunities, linking neighborhoods, infrastructure, and ecosystems into a single, data-driven strategy.

Planscape’s open, transparent platform allowed local agencies, utilities, and residents to visualize wildfire risk, validate results, and guide investment decisions together. This clarity and trust helped unlock $10 million in CAL FIRE funding to implement priority treatments, marking a significant step toward reducing wildfire risk across El Dorado County.

The project also shaped Planscape’s continued evolution. Insights from Placerville directly influenced new features in innovations like treatment “cards,” retreatment scheduling, and community map feedback, ensuring the platform keeps meeting real-world needs. Today, this same collaborative framework is being replicated by partners like the Amador RCD, proving Planscape’s scalability and value in building regional wildfire resilience.

Expanding Applications

This methodology is now being scaled up as similar organizations are adopting this approach. For example, the Amador RCD recently contracted SIG and Planscape to update their CWPP, which includes:

Stakeholder training and participation: Early introduction of Planscape to working-group members and community partners to build familiarity and buy-in during project scoping, ensuring continuity of planning beyond the contract period.
Integration with risk modeling: Using Planscape to complement quantitative wildfire-risk (QWR) analyses by identifying treatment zones around high-value resources and assets (HVRAs) and visualizing fuel-reduction opportunities at the county scale.
Scenario testing and prioritization: Running treatment scenarios within Planscape to evaluate different mitigation strategies—fuel-load reduction, WUI risk reduction, and biodiversity-friendly management—and quantify outcomes.
Continuity and cost efficiency: Transitioning from paid proprietary systems to Planscape’s open-source platform to maintain access and enable the Fire Safe Council to continue updating and testing treatment plans after project completion.
Public engagement: Publishing interactive Planscape maps and outputs on the CWPP website to allow community members to explore treatment options and provide feedback on local priorities.

Key Takeaway

Planscape bridges science, technology, and community to turn planning into progress.

In Placerville, by layering manual and Planscape suitability modeling and validation, the team built a shared framework that helped unify diverse data sources, guided local decision-making, and built confidence among residents and agencies alike. The result was not just a plan on paper, but a shared roadmap that secured funding, accelerated implementation, and strengthened trust in the process.

By empowering communities to visualize risk, test strategies, and act together, Planscape is redefining how wildfire resilience planning happens: locally led, data-informed, and impact-driven.