The Nature Conservancy (TNC) manages over 600,000 acres of land in fee and conservation easements in California. TNC’s mission is to “protect the lands and waters on which all life depends,” both across and beyond the state. TNC aims to manage the conservation estates to protect the conservation values and enhance resilience under climate change and larger and more severe wildfires. One important aspect of this management is the use of beneficial fire (prescribed fire, cultural fire, and managed wildfire for resource benefit) and strategic thinning followed by fire to improve forest resilience to wildfires.
The Nature Conservancy’s Forest Management Strategy team in California is focused on avoiding and mitigating the impacts of large, high severity wildfires as quickly as possible on TNC’s estate and across federally managed forests.
TNC helped develop the science behind Planscape and as a science-based organization is now using Planscape to help identify priority locations to implement prescribed fire projects.
A top-down science approach to TNC’s prescribed fire work is being matched with on the ground, bottom-up knowledge and traditional ecological knowledge when considering where to burn. TNC utilized Planscape to identify which of TNC California’s lands across the state should be a priority for prescribed burning considering current and future modeled conditions under climate change. The plan can tell us which properties to use beneficial fire approaches on and then land managers can use local and more fine scale resolution data to decide where on the landscape to use fire as a management tool.
Planscape was used to access, view and download freely available, science-panel approved, consistent data layers across the state, organized under the 10 pillars of the Framework for Resilience. The pillars of resilience for which there are future conditions under climate change modeled include: fire dynamics, vegetation resilience, biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration, air quality, and water security. Adopting Planscape and the ecoregional approach developed by the Wildfire Taskforce integrates TNC’s prescribed fire work with the state’s efforts, specifically to regional USDA Forest Service and other stakeholders that have been involved in planning forest management to address wildfire risk and resilience.
The USFS PROMOTe tool was used and integrated with the Planscape analysis. PROMOTe identifies four management strategies based on the current conditions and the estimated potential to reach target conditions in the future under climate change.
The four management strategies are monitor, protect, adapt, or transform. (See Povak et al. 2023, Povak et al. 2024.). TNC calculated an average score for a single strategy across all pillars of resilience, i.e. average of monitor values (per cell) across all pillars. Then that average score was used as the input to get the max value/strategy score. Locations where conditions are departed currently but show potential to be in target conditions in the future (adapt) based on 6 of the 10 pillars of resilience were the highest priority, as these are places where there is more certainty that conditions can be maintained over time. The next highest priority were locations where conditions are currently within target but likely departed in the future (protect).
| Strategy | Priority | Detail | Color |
| Adapt | 1 | Departed now, within target in the future. Prescribed fire and thinning treatments generally should be prioritized for these areas to reach target conditions with higher certainty they can be maintained over time. | Purple |
Protect | 1.1 | Within target now, departed in the future. Prescribed fire can be used to try and protect these places by treating around them for example to reduce the risk of high-severity fire to large trees. However, ongoing treatments may be required and costs to maintain target conditions could be high and may increase over time. | Orange |
| Transform | 2 | Departed now, departed in the future. Consider burning in these areas if the goal is to facilitate an alternative state or to delay a state change that might come from a wildfire. Higher uncertainty about future vegetation trajectories. | Red |
| Monitor | 3 | Within target now, within target in the future. This is not about collecting data and monitoring. If conditions change, consider the need to burn these locations. | Blue |
TNC plans to implement or has already implemented prescribed fire in two of the priority adapt properties that were the #4 and #5 in terms of total area (acres) in the adapt strategy: Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve and Independence Lake Preserve. The Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve is a mix of adapt (12% of the property), protect (34%), monitor (36%), and transform (15%) strategies, with 2,940 acres in the adapt strategy. About 23 acres of the Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve was prescribe burned during the Santa Barbara TREX in November 2024. Independence Lake is almost entirely in the adapt strategy (97%) with 2,863 acres. TNC is planning to conduct a prescribed fire at Independence Lake in October 2025. There are also plans to continue to expand the prescribed burn area on both the Dangermond Preserve and Independence Lake.
While these two properties were not selected for burning based on the Planscape tool, looking at the management strategies indicates these were excellent places to prioritize prescribed fire based on the potential to reach target conditions and higher certainty that the conditions could be maintained over time, or the adapt strategy. TNC plans to use the Planscape tool to help select additional properties that are a priority for prescribed fire projects in California. TNC staff can then use local information to identify the exact locations of where fire can be put on the ground, at what frequency, and under what prescription.
The USFS Pacific Southwest research station and the Planscape collaborative are working together to bring the PROMOTe analysis into a dedicated module within Planscape, so this analysis can be available to all users of the tool. Planscape is expanding its scope to be CONUS wide to serve more users and more landscapes.