How the Central Colorado Forest Collaborative is swiftly preparing for wildfire resilience
Across the southern half of the Wildfire Crisis Strategy's (WCS) Colorado Front Range Landscape, partners are coming together to improve wildfire resilience and mitigate risk.
Across the southern half of the Wildfire Crisis Strategy's (WCS) Colorado Front Range Landscape, partners are coming together to improve wildfire resilience and mitigate risk. Land managers from the Pike-San Isabel National Forests & Cimarron and Comanche National Grasslands (PSICC), and their partners, have started the process of building a cross-boundary treatment roadmap.
This roadmap will serve as a collectively developed, consensus-based project outline of priority treatments. In late 2023, the National Forest Foundation (NFF) tapped into recently designated funding for WCS landscapes to launch the early stages of a resilience plan for PSICC. NFF began by investigating available technology that help them achieve the following goals:
- Develop a common operating picture across the PSICC
- Expand upon the collaborative engagements already initiated by Coalitions and Collaboratives (COCO)
- Build a prioritized plan that lined up with the overarching WCS strategy goals, starting with prioritizing safety, water, and assets
To meet their technological and collaborative planning needs, NFF selected Vibrant Planet to help with the data aggregation, wildfire modeling, analysis, and prioritization. In early 2024, staff from the PSICC, NFF, and COCO, known as the Collaborative, started working with the Vibrant Planet team to follow an industry-standard framework for all-lands wildfire resilience and mitigation. They are currently completing a thorough, local landscape assessment and data audit, divided into two steps, that will ultimately lead into a strategic roadmap of prioritized projects.
The Challenge
Across the southern half of the Wildfire Crisis Strategy's (WCS) Colorado Front Range Landscape, partners are coming together to improve wildfire resilience and mitigate risk. Land managers from the Pike-San Isabel National Forests & Cimarron and Comanche National Grasslands (PSICC), and their partners, have started the process of building a cross-boundary treatment roadmap.
This roadmap will serve as a collectively developed, consensus-based project outline of priority treatments. In late 2023, the National Forest Foundation (NFF) tapped into recently designated funding for WCS landscapes to launch the early stages of a resilience plan for PSICC. NFF began by investigating available technology that help them achieve the following goals:
- Develop a common operating picture across the PSICC
- Expand upon the collaborative engagements already initiated by Coalitions and Collaboratives (COCO)
- Build a prioritized plan that lined up with the overarching WCS strategy goals, starting with prioritizing safety, water, and assets
To meet their technological and collaborative planning needs, NFF selected Vibrant Planet to help with the data aggregation, wildfire modeling, analysis, and prioritization. In early 2024, staff from the PSICC, NFF, and COCO, known as the Collaborative, started working with the Vibrant Planet team to follow an industry-standard framework for all-lands wildfire resilience and mitigation. They are currently completing a thorough, local landscape assessment and data audit, divided into two steps, that will ultimately lead into a strategic roadmap of prioritized projects.
The Solution
15 partners engaged
In order to build a prioritized implementation plan, the PSICC engaged diverse partners in a process to successfully identify strategic areas and values at risk to adverse impacts of wildfire within their landscape. As more strategic areas and values at risk have been identified, more groups have been engaged in this process. The list of partners, part of a broader group known as the Central Colorado Forest Collaborative, now includes more than 15 different organizations working together: Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Region, Colorado Springs Utilities, West Metro Fire Rescue, Inter Canyon Fire, Elk Creek Fire, Rocky Mountain Field Institute, Colorado State University Restoration Institute, USDA-Natural Resources Conservation, City of Cripple Creek, Colorado State Forest Service, Clear Creek Watershed and Forest Health Partnership, Colorado Parks and Wildfire, and the Pikes Peak Outdoor Recreation Alliance.
Managing 30+ strategic areas, resources, and values at risk of wildfire
After identifying what matters most to partners on the landscape, the Collaborative broke into subgroups that focused on identifying individual strategic areas and values at risk and determining their priority – a critical step in building one common operating picture.
The subgroups identified a diverse set of landscape features – everything from transmission lines and water infrastructure to bighorn sheep habitat (pictured right). In a recent report-out of the Collaborative’s process, Sally Bernstein, Conservation Connect Program Manager at NFF, commented, “the group identified many initial ideas for our values at risk, and Vibrant Planet helped us refine, group, and boil them down into clear areas we wanted to focus on.”
Vibrant Planet is collaborating with the partners to develop methodologies that determine how the strategic areas and values at risk will respond to disturbances across the landscape. For example, now that water and water infrastructure have been identified as key strategic areas and values at risk, Vibrant Planet is developing a landscape-wide risk model to determine areas of potential sedimentation or debris flow post-wildfire. This model will help inform the eventual list of prioritized treatments to mitigate that risk that Vibrant Planet will deliver to the Collaborative.
Greenback Cutthroat Trout: How we’re supporting WCS response functions
Across multiple landscapes, Vibrant Planet’s applied science team is working with the Forest Service’s Threatened and Endangered Species WCS Working Group to develop response functions for a wide range of species, including Greenback Cutthroat Trout, Canada Lynx, Preble's Meadow Jumping Mouse, Tricolored Bat, Mexican Spotted Owl, Pawnee Montane Skipper, Aspen prevalence, and Beaver Suitable habitat. Once developed, these values-at-risk will be available for all WCS landscapes using our platform. The Greenback Cutthroat Trout is found in the streams of the South Platte and Arkansas River basins, and will be particularly helpful for the Pike collaborative, among the rest of the partners working across WCS landscapes.
The Results
Later this summer, the Collaborative will have access to their common operating picture – a custom, digital analysis of their landscape on Vibrant Planet, designed for collaboration and fast iteration. This will include not only their strategic areas and values at risk and response functions, but also a detailed view of the risk reduction potential across the landscape, and available risk mitigation treatments. “We’re excited to get into the platform and see our hard work in action, layered with Vibrant Planet’s analytics. This is going to get us one step closer to building our cross-boundary treatment roadmap,” explains Jennifer Peterson, USDA Forest service.
Vibrant Planet’s team will continue supporting the Collaborative through the decision support process, helping facilitate workshops, and guide partners to the point of developing a prioritized restoration plan.
By using Vibrant Planet, this newly-formed collaborative isn’t merely feeding a decision support tool. They have been following a thorough collaborative landscape assessment and values identification process in line with wildfire risk-based frameworks. At the end of the process, they will have used the platform to build a prioritized, sequenced resilience strategy that gets them one step closer to implementation. The long term monitoring, management, and evolution of the projects will be led by the Collaborative, which will steward the ongoing work through implementation. In their next phase, the Collaborative will use Vibrant Planet to build a cross-boundary treatment sequenced roadmap, which is a collectively developed, consensus-based project outline of priority treatments. This roadmap will be used to inform decisions and strengthen cross-boundary collaboration.
