Colorado State Forest Service

In 2009, the Colorado General Assembly passed legislation titled the Colorado Healthy Forests and Vibrant Communities Act (HB09-1199), which increases efforts to address wildfire risk, provides resources to the Colorado State Forest Service to augment its technical outreach capabilities, and provides loans and grants for market-based and forest treatment solutions to reduce wildfire risk. With this legislation, the CSFS has been able to increase services...

Colorado's forested landscapes are essential to our well-being. Yet, these same landscapes are threatened by wildfires, insects and disease. Our ability to manage for these changes is limited by shrinking budgets, a declining forest products industry and volatile energy prices. Our current policy efforts should link forest health improvements and forest industry vitality to developing more efficient forest product manufacturing and encouraging renewable...

In 2009, the Colorado General Assembly passed legislation titled the Colorado Healthy Forests and Vibrant Communities Act (HB09-1199), which increases efforts to address wildfire risk, provides resources to the Colorado State Forest Service to augment its technical outreach capabilities, and provides loans and grants for market-based and forest treatment solutions to reduce wildfire risk.

The Colorado State Forest Service has designed this plan to provide a road map for improving forest health across Colorado in the coming decade. Major forest types in Colorado can be categorized by the dominant overstory vegetation; these include conifer-hardwood, conifer, mixed conifer, hardwood (primarily aspen), lodgepole pine, oak shrubland, piñon-juniper, ponderosa pine, riparian and spruce-fir.

This Plan is designed to be a guiding document that provides clear direction at a high level, which is easy to understand and used regularly internally and externally. This Strategic Plan should be used in conjunction with other internal planning processes that focus on a tactical level to ensure actions taken by the CSFS are aligned with our Vision and have a positive impact on achieving the Strategic Goals that support our Mission.

This project involved developing an updated Colorado statewide wildfire risk assessment. The project was based on leveraging the data and achievements of the West Wide Wildfire Risk Assessment (WWA) project, and tailoring these to reflect Colorado conditions, requirements and priorities. The WWA documented the risk from wildfire by quantifying the magnitude of the current wild land fire problem in the West. The WWA is unique because it will assess...