Fire mitigation

Fuels mapping the plan can point to

Canopy height, ladder fuels and structure exposure measured from the air, at the scale a city plans on and the resolution a crew works to.

Talk to Eli The Ashland CWPP work

The problem

A plan has to say where the fuels are, parcel by parcel

A Community Wildfire Protection Plan, a defensible space program or a thinning prescription all run into the same wall: somebody has to say where the fuel actually is, in numbers that hold up in a council meeting and survive an appeal. Driving the streets and writing down what you see does not scale to a whole town, and satellite fuel models are built for landscapes, not for the fifteen feet around a house.

Drone LiDAR measures it directly. The pulses that reach the ground give you the terrain, the ones that do not give you the vegetation standing on it, and the difference between them is the fuel. That is one flight producing the canopy structure, the ladder fuel call and the per structure numbers from the same measurement, so they agree with each other by construction.

What the cloud sees

Ladder fuels come out of the vertical structure

A classified point cloud separates ground, low, medium and high vegetation. That separation is what makes a ladder fuel call possible: the fuel that matters is the stuff between the surface and the crowns, and it is invisible in anything that only measures the top.

Drone point cloud of a conifer stand seen obliquely, every return coloured by its height above the ground: the ground itself tan, low brush blue and green, the tallest crowns red. — Every return in a stand of the Ashland watershed coloured by how far above the ground it sits: the ground itself tan, brush and regeneration low and cool, the old crowns warm at the top. Vertical structure is what a fuels question asks about.

The measurement, then the map

Height above ground is the whole game. Once every point carries it, the products fall out: a canopy height model for the stand, a per tree height for the inventory, and the vertical profile that says whether a surface fire in this unit reaches the crowns or lays down.

We report what was measured and what was inferred, separately. A fuels layer that cannot say which is which is not something to write a prescription against.

Structure exposure

Three numbers for every structure in town

The measures the 2025 Ashland Community Wildfire Protection Plan is built on. One flight, one classified cloud, three numbers per structure, delivered into the city's GIS.

Ladder fuels around the structure

What share of the vegetation within the home ignition zone is ladder fuel, the growth that carries a surface fire up into the crowns. Measured per structure from the vertical structure of the point cloud.

Fuels within five feet

What is growing in the five foot zone against the walls, which is the first thing a defensible space assessment looks at and the hardest thing to see from a road.

Canopy over the roof

How much of the roof sits under canopy, so a city can rank blocks and a homeowner can see why theirs came out where it did.

The Ashland CWPP LiDAR, and what the plan did with it

Canopy height model of a forest block drawn flat, pale yellow for the lowest brush through orange to deep red for the tallest crowns, with bare ground in grey. — Canopy height across a block of the Ashland watershed, drawn flat: pale yellow for the lowest brush through orange to deep red for the tallest crowns, bare ground in grey. The same surface a ladder fuel call is made from.

Ashland, 2024 to 2025

A whole town, in 100 acre sections

For the City of Ashland we flew about 4,300 acres across the city in 2024, in 100 acre sections over about two and a half weeks, at 250 feet above the ground. It came back as bare earth, surface and canopy height models, individual tree canopy polygons, ladder fuel identification and the three structure exposure measures, delivered into the city's own GIS in support of city staff.

The plan those numbers went into is public, names Rogue Reconnaissance as the aerial LiDAR contractor, describes the acquisition, and draws its fuels and exposure figures from this data. The City Council accepted it on August 19, 2025.

The 2025 plan, City of Ashland

Dead trees are fuel

Mortality is a mitigation question, not only a forest health one

A standing dead tree beside a trail, a road or a house is a hazard tree and it is fuel. The same flight that measures the canopy can classify what is dying in it, which is why the two jobs usually travel together.

Tree crowns outlined over an aerial photograph of forest and coloured by health class: green healthy, lavender ponderosa pine, yellow declining, orange dieback, red dead. — Every crown a machine delineated in a stretch of the Ashland watershed, outlined over the photograph it was found in: green healthy, lavender ponderosa pine, yellow declining, orange dieback, red dead.

The same forest with only the trees in trouble marked: yellow declining, orange dieback, red dead, scattered through green canopy. — The same ground with only the trees in trouble left on it. This is the layer a crew is sent out on.

What Ashland got

Across the city's watershed lands we classed about 30,000 Douglas fir crowns into four health classes, with ponderosa pine separated out, each crown carrying its species and height, with a tally per area and a geodatabase the city's GIS staff work from. The city published the 2023 findings and acted on them: dead trees came out by helicopter on about 400 acres in the spring of 2024.

The Ashland Douglas fir assessment Ashland News on the findings

Colour infrared view of the same forest: living conifers throw back near infrared and print bright crimson, while dead trees and bare ground stay brown and grey. — The health signal itself. In colour infrared a living conifer throws back near infrared and prints bright crimson; a dying or dead one does not. This is the band combination the classes were read from.

How it looks when it lands

The same stand, measured three ways

Every delineated tree crown filled with its health class colour over a darkened aerial photograph, so the pattern of the die off reads across the stand. — Crowns filled by health class, so the pattern of the die off reads before any single tree does.

Tree crowns filled by measured height on a purple to yellow ramp over a darkened aerial photograph of forest. — The same crowns filled by measured height instead: purple at about 30 feet, through pink and orange, to yellow at 150 feet and over.

Drone point cloud of a conifer stand seen from the side and coloured by the camera on the aircraft, every tree standing as a separate spire above the falling ground. — The flight's own point cloud, every conifer standing as a separate spire above the falling ground.

What you get

Deliverables

Classified point cloud: ground, low, medium and high vegetation
Bare earth, surface and canopy height models
Individual tree canopy polygons with height
Ladder fuel identification from the cloud, not from a guess at the canopy
Structure exposure per structure, the three measures above
Tree health classes where a mortality question rides along
Everything delivered into your GIS, in the schema your staff already work in

Who it is for

Cities and counties writing or updating a Community Wildfire Protection Plan
Fire districts and defensible space programs that need to rank blocks
Watershed councils and land trusts with a fuels problem on their ground
Foresters and fuels contractors writing prescriptions
Utilities and road authorities with hazard trees along a corridor

Flying the ground before the work and again afterward is the cheapest way to show a funder what changed. Say so at the start and the first flight is designed for it.

The other side of it

And when it is already burning

Everything above happens before there is any smoke. Once a fire is running the job changes: a night infrared flight, heat classified from measured temperature, a perimeter and isolated heat sources in the schema the incident's GIS specialist expects, in their hands before the morning briefing.

Night infrared mapping on active incidents

Send us the ground and the question.

A boundary, roughly how many acres, and what the plan has to say. We will come back with a flight and what it would give you.

Talk to Eli

Email info@roguerecon.net or call 808 298 6290.