LA County Wildfire Risk

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About This Map

Each dot represents a sampled LA County building, colored by its Risk to Potential Structures (RPS) — the annualized expected loss from wildfire. This map compares RPS values produced by different burn probability methodologies: even though the underlying building stock is identical, the three independent fire behavior modeling approaches yield meaningfully different risk scores, revealing how much methodology choice shapes community-level risk estimates.

Field(s) Source Methodology (2 sentences)
rps_scott, crps_scott Scott et al. 2024 — USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station & Pyrologix LLC Used the FSim geospatial fire simulator with LANDFIRE 2020 fuel data at 270 m to model burn probability, then ran FlamMap across the full seasonal weather spectrum at 30 m resolution to model fire intensity. These inputs were combined to produce conditional risk to potential structures (cRPS) for every land parcel in the contiguous U.S.
rps_riley, bp_scott_riley, bp_2047_riley Riley et al. 2025 — USDA Forest Service Generated annual burn probability rasters at 270 m resolution for both present-day (~2011) and projected mid-century (~2047) climate conditions using large-ensemble fire simulations. Applying these probabilities to structure exposure values yields RPS estimates that can be compared directly to Scott et al. under current and future climate scenarios.
usda_bp USDA Wildfire Risk to Communities — Dillon et al. 2024, USDA Forest Service Produced a nationally consistent burn probability layer at 270 m using FSim with LANDFIRE 2020 fuels, then upsampled to 30 m to align with structure-level assessments. This layer is designed for standardized cross-regional comparison of wildfire likelihood across all U.S. lands.
rps_usda Composite (this analysis) Multiplies the USDA burn probability (usda_bp) by CarbonPlan’s conditional risk score (crps_scott), combining a nationally standardized ignition likelihood with a structure-level conditional exposure metric. This field is not a published product — it illustrates how substituting a different burn probability source into the same RPS framework shifts the resulting risk rankings.

CarbonPlan Open California Risk (OCR) is the platform that spatially joined all datasets above to individual building footprints from Overture Maps Foundation, enabling per-building comparisons across fire risk methodologies at scale.