Frequently Asked Questions

Wildfire Risk to Communities is a free, easy-to-use website with interactive maps, charts, and data to help communities in the United States understand, explore, and reduce wildfire risk. Maps and data are available at the community, county, and state levels. Wildfire Risk to Communities is a project of the USDA Forest Service, under the direction of Congress in the 2018 Consolidated Appropriations Act (H.R. 1625, Section 210).

Wildfire Risk to Communities was first published in 2020 and was the first time that wildfire risk to communities had been mapped nationwide. Continually updated, Wildfire Risk to Communities uses nationally consistent data and risk metrics grounded in the best available science. In addition to providing information about community wildfire risk, the website includes resources and solutions to help manage, mitigate, and reduce risk.

Wildfire Risk to Communities is designed for municipal, tribal, county, and state elected officials; land use planners; fire managers; and fire collaboratives. It may also be useful for government staff and leadership, as well as neighborhood associations. While not designed for individual citizens, the website may offer helpful and informative resources for residents and homeowners.

The purpose of Wildfire Risk to Communities is to help communities understand, explore, and reduce wildfire risk. It provides information about communities’ relative wildfire risk profile, the nature and effects of wildfire risk, and actions communities can take. For example, information can be used to:

• Prioritize communities where wildfire risk is greatest within a state or county.
• Identify what and where mitigation activities will be most effective at reducing community wildfire risk.
• See where populations may be especially vulnerable to wildfire because of social and economic factors.
• Find resources, partners, and solutions to help manage and reduce risk.

As a national-scale project with a focus on communities, Wildfire Risk to Communities has limitations. The data are not locally calibrated and are not fine scale—they are best for considering risk as aggregated across a community and are not designed for considering risk at the individual home scale.

The project is focused on risk to communities with an emphasis on homes and other structures. It does not consider wildfire impacts to other important assets such as watersheds, landscape health, areas of cultural significance, or infrastructure. The data are not predictive and do not reflect current fire danger conditions or future climate projections. Wildfire Risk to Communities is intended to be a starting point to help answer questions about community risk.

An update to the social vulnerability data in the Vulnerable Populations section is planned for early 2025.

See information about previous updates in our Release Notes.

The site is best viewed in modern web browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, or Edge. Internet Explorer is not supported.

The maps and data in the Explore section require a decent internet connection. You may experience performance issues if you have low bandwidth.

Please use the following citation:

USDA Forest Service. Wildfire Risk to Communities. https://wildfirerisk.org [Date Accessed]

Wildfire Risk to Communities is not intended to replace state, regional, or local risk assessments. Assessments generated at the state, regional, or local level provide useful and important information, likely with more localized data. Wildfire Risk to Communities only focuses on one value (houses), while other risk assessments may include other values (e.g., watersheds, wildlife, forest resilience). Since Wildfire Risk to Communities is based on nationally consistent data, it can be a helpful tool to compare your wildfire risk with other communities, counties, or states.

See what other wildfire hazard assessments are available in your area in the National Association of State Forester’s Wildfire Hazard Explorer or in the USGS Wildfire Hazard and Risk Assessment Clearinghouse.

Wildfire Risk to Communities is not a replacement for parcel-level or home assessments, which are necessary to understand how individual structures and properties are susceptible to wildfire. Wildfire Risk to Communities uses a generalized concept of susceptibility for all homes and does not account for homes where risk may have been mitigated. An individual home’s survivability is driven primarily by local conditions (known as the “Home Ignition Zone”), including its construction materials and the vegetation in the immediate area. The only way to truly assess home susceptibility is through individual home assessments, which are well beyond the scope of a national-scale project like Wildfire Risk to Communities.

Different wildfire risk assessments will show varied results, depending on the questions the assessments were designed to answer. For example, risk assessments may focus on landscape health or on difficulty of wildfire response. Wildfire Risk to Communities focuses on the risk to communities—in other words, homes and other buildings. As a national project, it is likely different in scale and scope from state or local assessments. It is not locally calibrated or fine scale. 

See what other wildfire hazard assessments are available in your area in the National Association of State Forester’s Wildfire Hazard Explorer or in the USGS Wildfire Hazard and Risk Assessment Clearinghouse.

Wildfire Risk to Communities is not designed for insurance companies. Wildfire Risk to Communities is not intended to replace individual, home-level assessments, which are necessary to understand how individual structures and properties are susceptible to wildfire. Many insurance companies conduct their own wildfire risk assessments at the scale necessary for their business decisions. State governments have the primary role in regulating insurance and every state has a department of insurance that assists consumers and regulates insurers.

Yes. The data are available for download as GIS and tabular files. You can combine them with localized information to conduct your own comparisons and analyses.

Read detailed information in our Methods section. Wildfire Risk to Communities is built from nationally consistent data, including:

• Vegetation and fire-behavior fuel models from the interagency LANDFIRE program
• Topographic data from the U.S. Geological Survey
• Historical weather patterns from GRIDMET and the national network of Remote Automated Weather Stations (RAWS)
• Long-term simulations of large wildfire behavior from the USDA Forest Service
• Community data (including boundaries and socioeconomic information) from U.S. Census Bureau 
• Building footprint datasets from FEMA’s USA Structures and OneGeo

Wildfire Risk to Communities is based on techniques developed by the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory of the Rocky Mountain Research Station. The techniques are documented in A Wildfire Risk Assessment Framework for Land and Resource Management (Scott et al. 2013, RMRS-GTR-315).

The USDA Forest Service developed the Wildfire Risk to Communities data in partnership with Pyrologix, which has more than two decades of experience in wildland fire science research, development, and application.

The USDA Forest Service developed the interactive website in partnership with Headwaters Economics—an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit research group with expertise in developing custom data tools and in wildfire risk reduction at the community level.

For the first time since publication in 2020, wildfire risk maps have been completely updated at wildfirerisk.org. The new and improved wildfire risk data are based on more recent inputs and include methodological refinements, including:

• New methods and data that better capture wildfire risk based on a range of weather types. 
• The most up-to-date vegetation data available.
• New data and methods to better capture the locations of housing and people.
• A new “Risk Reduction Zone” page to help communities see what types of mitigation activities will be most effective in different locations.
• More resources to help communities reduce risk, including a new section on grants and funding opportunities.

More details can be found in the technical papers in the download section.

Direct comparisons between the 2020 and 2024 versions are impossible due to fundamental methodological changes that include new input data, different modeling tools, and new methods for summarizing data by jurisdictions.

Data for tribal areas can be found in the Explore section of Wildfire Risk to Communities. Tribal areas include tribal and trust lands, as derived from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Indian/Alaska Native/Native Hawaiian Areas dataset.

For Wildfire Risk to Communities, tribal areas that cross state boundaries are divided by state and listed separately for each state they overlap. This enables users to view their area of interest alongside state-specific wildfire risk maps and to view demographic data that are segmented in this way by the Census. For example, Navajo Nation will be available as:

• Navajo Nation Reservation and Off-Reservation Trust Land (AZ portion)
• Navajo Nation Reservation and Off-Reservation Trust Land (NM portion)
• Navajo Nation Reservation and Off-Reservation Trust Land (UT portion)

Wildfire Risk to Communities is built from a variety of data, each with different vintages as shown in the table below. 

The process of modeling and mapping wildfire risk for the nation is complicated. In a national effort, what appears to be a mistake may be an artifact of using national datasets rather than locally calibrated, locally derived information. All data is available for download as GIS and tabular files so you can customize and combine them with local data.