Natural Hazards Group

Spatial Informatics Group's Natural Hazards Group is a consulting team that assesses wildfire and flood risk for public agencies, land trusts and private landowners, mainly in California and the western United States. It quantifies the likely impacts of natural disasters, models wildfire behaviour, prioritises fuel treatments, tracks wildfire greenhouse-gas emissions, and supports NEPA and CEQA analysis and Community Wildfire Protection Plans. Its staff include three Registered Professional Foresters.

The work combines fire-behaviour simulation with weather, fuels, vegetation and asset data, and uses satellite imagery to map burn severity, monitor wildfire trends and track recovery. For Save the Redwoods League, SIG produced a burn-severity map of the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fire within weeks (the published map includes a Sentinel-2 relative burn-ratio layer) and found that 78 percent of the Cascade Creek property had burned at high severity. For the California Public Utilities Commission, through CAL FIRE, it simulated over 100 million ignition events to build a statewide fire threat map used to regulate fire risk from power lines and communication facilities. Flood risk work and near-real-time flood monitoring use SIG's open science remote sensing and AI tools.

Named clients include CAL FIRE, the USDA Forest Service (Eastern Sierra Climate & Communities Resilience Project), American Forest Foundation, Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority, the Western Forestry Leadership Coalition and the Amador Fire Safe Council. SIG is listed on the California Fire Safe Council's Fire Safe Vendor List.