An exploration of landscape level fuel treatment strategies for wildland fire mitigation in the Santa Monica Mountains of Southern California

This project explores the origins of the wildland fire threat within the urban interface of the Santa Monica Mountains and the Southern California region. It identifies the social and economic events that have transformed the region from a historically low intensity fire environment, into the current high intensity fire environment. It deviates from the conventional wisdom of what constitutes "native vegetation" and provides the reader with an alternative view that reveals new possibilities for wildland fire mitigation. Using fire modeling, this project investigates the landscape nature of wildland fire activity within the Santa Monica Mountains and provides numerous examples of this wildfire relationship at the regional level. These new insights demonstrate the landscape nature of the fire linkage between the Santa Monica Mountains, Simi Hills and the Santa Susanna Mountains. This research demonstrates the methods and techniques necessary to identify those wildfire relationships, and provides examples of how to extinguish that relationship. This project concludes with an evaluation of the impact of landscape level fuel treatment strategies on wildland fire risk in the urban interface of the Santa Monica Mountains. Using native vegetation and landscape level fuel management strategies, this paper demonstrates that it is possible to greatly reduce the probability of catastrophic wildland fire loss while maintaining a vibrant natural environment. Using FlamMap, a wildland fire modeling system and goal directed geovisualization; this research describes the fire behavior, prescribes a course of action, and assesses the impact of that action on residential structure loss. This research defines fuel treatment strategies that can be applied at the landscape level to contain large scale fire events, and to shield individual structures and residential communities at the parcel level. While these methods are mainly directed at fire mitigation, their application will also provide for enhanced firefighter safety and increased fire suppression opportunities.