In fire-prone communities, preparing for wildfire is a shared responsibility. For private landowners, that can include creating defensible space by removing nearby vegetation and flammable objects and having a detailed evacuation plan. Mitigation efforts on individual properties and being prepared to evacuate in an emergency do more than protect homes and people from wildfire. They help streamline evacuation, reserve resources, and create spaces where firefighters can more safely respond to dynamic conditions. Yet, despite known threats, many communities are not fully prepared for wildfire or to evacuate safely. What moves property owners to act, and how can local fire departments help community residents better prepare?

The Forest Service is trying to help motivate landowners by working directly with local partners toward a shared mission of improving wildfire readiness. Specifically, Forest Service researchers, with support from Fire and Aviation Management, are part of a team of scientists and wildfire practitioners at the Wildfire Research Center, or WiRē, pronounced “WY-ree,” who have been assessing community wildfire risk, one community at a time, for nearly a decade.

The WiRē team is working to fill a gap in research and practical understanding to guide community wildfire preparation programs. They began by completing an assessment across dozens of communities. Doing so has given them a large enough dataset to see trends emerge across unique communities. Combining systematic data collection with local expertise allows them to pinpoint key steps a community can take to build wildfire resilience.  

“I think what’s unique about WiRē is the team itself consists of researchers and practitioners. Usually in research, you just focus on the research component, or if you're a practitioner, the practitioner component. What WiRē does so well is integrate both,” said Forest Service research economist José Sánchez, who recently joined WiRē as the lead Forest Service researcher.  

WiRē goes to the Kenai Peninsula  

Starting in 2023, the WiRē team collaborated with the Kenai Peninsula Borough Office of Emergency Management and local emergency services in Cooper Landing, Funny River and Nikiski, Alaska. In each community, they assessed wildfire risk on private properties, surveyed homeowners about their notion of wildfire risk, discussed steps taken to mitigate risk and evacuation plans, and what might encourage or limit future actions.  

Like every WiRē project, this effort wasn’t just about gathering data—it was about pairing the observations of trained mitigation specialists with the perspectives of homeowners and discovering where and why there may be discrepancies between them. Together, this information paints a more accurate picture of each community’s preparedness level and where local partners have clear opportunities to intervene.

Translating data into action  

Occasionally, this alchemy reveals solutions hiding in plain sight. In Alaska, partners had a lightbulb moment when they saw the summarized data.

“The completed assessments for Cooper Landing, Funny River and Nikiski will help us realize data-supported projects from outreach to mitigation, and we’ve already targeted and completed ‘low-hanging fruit,’” said Brenda Ahlberg, director of the Kenai Peninsula Borough Office of Emergency Management.

Proper home address signage is a simple yet core component of community safety. It helps ensure emergency services can quickly and efficiently locate and respond to emergencies. The WiRē risk assessments revealed that in Funny River, 66% of residential properties had address signage that met local safety standards. However, just a few miles away in Nikiski, only 4% of residential properties had proper signage. To local partners, that difference stood out.  

They connected the dots: Funny River maintained a simple and effective program offering low cost, fireproof address signs that improved visibility during fire conditions. It was a small effort with lifesaving potential. For the community of Nikiski, this wasn’t just a data point—it was a problem that could directly affect firefighters trying to locate homes in smoke or darkness.  

Seeing this disparity through the WiRē data sparked action. The Kenai Peninsula Borough Office of Emergency Management and the Nikiski Fire Department relaunched a dormant address signage program, leveraged funding and rolled out a public outreach campaign to help homeowners get signs installed quickly and affordably. A data insight became a pathway to a straightforward yet consequential community solution.

Beyond tackling the low-hanging fruit, implementing a WiRē project provided an avenue for the Kenai Peninsula Borough Office of Emergency Management and their All-Lands All-Hands interagency partners to interact more directly with community members about wildfire mitigation and preparation. This was a goal they had outlined in their borough-wide Community Wildfire Protection Plan—the first of its kind in Alaska—and successfully accomplished through the survey process and project-related community meetings.

A WiRē project is just the beginning

Though this set of WiRē projects has completed, the Kenai Peninsula Borough Office of Emergency Management now possesses a wealth of local data and insights, which they can use to inform their wildfire preparedness programming. They’re also equipped with training and data collection tools to repeat the process, so in the future, they can compare new data to this baseline and evaluate the impact of their efforts.  

At the same time, this is just the beginning of the Kenai Peninsula Borough Office of Emergency Management’s partnership with WiRē, and WiRē’s presence in Alaska. They joined the growing WiRē Community of Practice for current and past WiRē project partners, who meet quarterly to learn from and connect with other communities navigating the ongoing process of building more fire-adapted communities.  

“The internal joke is we never break up with our partners,” said Colleen Donovan, co-executive director of the WiRē Center. “Yes, a community assessment has a beginning and an end, but there's so much more to that story than just our final report.” It’s not just long-term research but also working with partners long-term that will prepare communities to live with wildfire.