2025 LA Fire Resources
Los Angeles Fire Workshop
On April 17, 2025, the Los Angeles Fire Workshop was held in Pasadena. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together academic and professional experts to learn from the devastating urban fires that occurred in Los Angeles and to identify research needs in the aftermath. The workshop will generate a series of articles and materials that identify system, community, and landscape issues associated with increasing fire risks in communities and pathways forward. Click here to read the Los Angeles Fire Workshop: Causes, Consequences, Visioning report.
Post-Fire Restoration and Recovery Manual for Western Urban Forests
With recent increases in wildfire-driven events affecting urban communities, there is a need to develop a science-based online manual that provides information and guidelines for assessing and restoring urban and community forests affected by fire events. This DRAFT manual and its associated online components provide a guide to the management, planning and policies for restoring urban forests in fire-affected communities. Information consists of a review of the relevant literature, case studies of urban wildfires in the western United States, including lessons learned, and listings of resources available for both public official and homeowners. This DRAFT guide is intended for public officials, including professionals and elected individuals as well as Homeowners, and Homeowner Associations. The guide in still in DRAFT form but has three goals:
- To provide an overview of information and guidelines related to the practice of urban tree management – arboriculture and urban forestry – in post-fire affected communities in more urban and populated settings. Most of the material refers to the issues, actions, and considerations after a fire has occurred. The emphasis is on directing readers to existing sources of information when possible; not recreating that same information.
- To provide an overview and sequence of steps and processes that can be used to assess, plan and manage for urban tree canopy before, during, and after an urban fire. Some of the processes/actions are sequential while others occur during different steps in the planning-management cycle or might be dependent on pre- fire planning as well as resources and existing information.
- To provide references, information sources, and links that can provide background information on issues covered in this guide as well as on more general topics in arboriculture and urban forest management that are useful in a post-fire situation. It will also present a suite of tree planting, flammability, and design guidelines for restoring fire affected urban forests and landscapes.
The Post-Fire Restoration and Recovery Manual for Western Urban Forests Draft can also be viewed via clicking the image below.
Post-Fire Urban Tree Assessment Impacts and Protocol
Fire affected urban trees in the public Right-of-Way were measured and assessed for fire impacts in Altadena and Pacific Palisades during January-May 2025. Results and information will be used to: 1) Develop a post-fire urban forest strike team emergency assessment response protocol, 2) Establish pre- and post-fire tree health and mortality monitoring sites, 3) Understand how different urban tree species and functional traits respond to fire.
Project Team: UC Davis, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, UC Los Angeles, U of Florida-IFAS, USDA FS
Alessandro Ossola, Edith de Guzman, Chris Shogren, Ryan Klein, Francisco Escobedo
Post-Fire Urban Landscape Mapping Using Terrestrial LiDAR
This project conducted a rapid forensic assessment and mapping of urban forest landscapes within the Eaton and Palisades Fire perimeters, in order to: 1) Assess fire damage to the urban forest in relation to its structure and composition, the built environment, and data on fire dynamics; 2) Map representative parcels with burned versus unburned landscaping and vegetation around fire-affected buildings; and 3) Test the extent to which tree species with varying ecological traits might have ignited and contributed to building loss and damage.
Project Team: UC Davis, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, UC Los Angeles, U of Florida-IFAS, USDA FS
Alessandro Ossola, Edith de Guzman, Chris Shogren, Ryan Klein, Francisco Escobedo
Post-Fire Urban Tree Risk Assessment Arborist Study
How arborists assess fire damaged trees, and the resulting mitigation can ultimately affect which trees are removed and retained post-fire. The purpose of this project is to evaluate how different arborists assess the potential risk associated with fire damaged urban trees and what mitigation practices are recommend for returning trees to an acceptable level of risk. The study will use various International Society of Arboriculture methods and a survey to gauge arborist perceptions of risk and previous industry experience.
Project Team: UC Davis, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, UC Los Angeles, U of Florida-IFAS, USDA FS
Ryan Klein, Chris Shogren, Alessandro Ossola, Edith de Guzman, Francisco Escobedo
Social-ecological impacts of the 2025 Los Angeles urban fires on communities, neighborhoods, and homes
Impacts from urban fires are usually described in terms of the numbers of acres burned, and number of “structures” destroyed. The purpose of this project is to characterize the social-ecological characteristics of the communities impacted by the 2025 Los Angeles Fires. Specifically, we are spatially analyzing how factors such as tree cover, urban morphology, defensible space buffers, property value, home owner ethnicity, age, and number of occupants, etc. were related to the levels of home destruction at both the neighborhood and home-level.
Project Team: USGS, USDA FS
Carl Norlen, Sadie Sharma, Francisco Escobedo