The problem
A Community Wildfire Protection Plan has to say where the fuels are relative to the homes, parcel by parcel, and it has to hold up in a council meeting. The city needed canopy structure across the whole town.
What we flew
- Drone LiDAR across the city in 2024, about 4,300 acres at 250 feet above ground in two and a half weeks
- Processed to a classified point cloud, bare earth, surface, and canopy height
What we delivered
- Bare earth elevation model, surface model, and canopy height model
- Individual tree canopy polygons
- Ladder fuel identification from the vertical structure of the point cloud
- Vegetation buffer analysis around structures: ladder fuel percentages around each structure, vegetative fuels within five feet of a structure, and canopy cover over rooftops
- Delivered into the city's GIS in direct support of city staff
A canopy height model is a fuels map if you build it for fuels. Ground, low, medium, and high vegetation come out of the same classified point cloud, and that separation is what makes a ladder fuel call possible.
The plan is public, and the figures in it came off this data. It lists Rogue Reconnaissance as the aerial LiDAR contractor on its acknowledgements page, describes the acquisition on page 70, and draws the ladder fuel, five foot zone, canopy over roof, and structure density figures from it on pages 73 to 75. The City Council accepted the plan on August 19, 2025.
