Overview

This Storymap and tool helps illustrate the implications of climate change for growing wildfire risks in the Southeastern US.

The risks that uncontrolled fire and smoke pose for people, infrastructure, and ecosystem services are changing rapidly with climate change–and with other landscape and societal drivers. Managing forests for a safe and resilient future requires understanding these interacting drivers of change and investing in tools like prescribed fire with change in mind.

Users can explore an assessment of changing wildfire risks in forests of the southern United States through 5 themed sections:

1. Wildfire Risks

• The risk assessment and maps presented in this section uses advanced modeling techniques and a wealth of spatial data to quantify current wildfire risks across large forest landscapes, as well as potential future changes driven by climate change. The resulting spatial information can support efforts to manage risk, and build resilience to future changes, in the places that are likely to experience the most impact.

2. Landscapes of Fire

• The firescape that a community or property is situated within has implications for wildfire, prescribed fire, and their social and ecological consequences. Firescapes provide a landscape-level context for understanding what kinds of ecosystem management and community preparedness responses may be appropriate in different places for effectively managing wildfire risk. The maps in this section classify landscapes across the Southeastern US with at least 25% forest cover into nine different firescape types. 

3. Projecting Future Risks

• Using models and future scenarios to visualize how these processes may play out gives planners a tool to help put current management activities in place that will build resilience to future change. Highlighted in this section are four future scenarios, based on a regional assessment of firescapes and wildfire risks. The analysis quantifies how risks may be likely to change in the coming decades, and how opportunities for risk management through fuel reductions may also change.

4. Managing Risk

• Confronting the wildfire crisis as climate change advances will require new tools for expanding such practices strategically, to achieve efficient and effective risk management and mitigation at large landscape scales. This section explores wildfire risk mitigation strategies, maps fuel reduction opportunities, and projects the utility of fuel reductions under climate change using the methods described in the ‘Projecting Future Risks’ section.

5. Explore

• The viewer in this section can be used to compare map layers included in the assessment, including projections to mid-century (2040-2070) under multiple future scenarios. Users can zoom in to areas of interest and examine local risk differences and similarities and between the risk to people and ecosystem services.