At-risk communities are referenced in the HFRA Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) definition. The source for this data is a national list of at-risk communities compiled by the Wildfire Risk Reduction Team (WRRIT). This source can be used by regional and forest staff as a reference to identify at-risk communities to be used where Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) do not exist or where applicable in addition to CWPPs.

The at-risk communities in this data set are primarily digitized based on the Federal register list of At-Risk Communities Additional communities from wildfirerisk.org (from the RDS 2016 supplements) or communities identified by states and/or counties have been incorporated. Some data sources used to spatially locate these at-risk communities are point features, and therefore extent of the community must be estimated. To estimate the community extent, the median size of census place at risk communities is used. The median size is rounded to a 1 mi buffer. That community extent can be adjusted with local knowledge of the actual size of the community.

HFRA At-Risk will result in a subset of at-risk communities compared to the nationally compiled list based on the region and forest discretion.

Additionally, some areas of the nation, specifically Region 01, are required to follow the legal interpretation of using either Part A: CWPP OR Part B: At Risk Communities and Evacuation Routes, but only Part B where Part A does not exist. The rest of the US does not need to follow that interpretation and will use both Part A and Part B. For Region 1, At Risk communities in this layer will only be where CWPPs do not exist. The rest of the US will populate At Risk communities that will be using in combination with their CWPPs, if they exist.

The at-risk communities in this layer will be buffered using the buffer distance field which is defined as:

Per the HFRA WUI definition, an at-risk community is buffered by 0.5 mi unless there are sustained steep slopes, a geographic feature that will aid in a creating a fuel break, or is in Very High Wildfire Hazard Potential. If the area between 0.5mi-1.5mi meet any of these criteria, then Buffer_Distance field should be changed to 1.5mi. For estimated community extents, it is the estimated extent that will be buffered.

These transactional HFRA_AtRisk (communities) will be buffered and combined with HFRA_Evac (routes) and HFRA_CWPP boundaries to produce the publication HFRA_WUI data layer in the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). The EDW HFRA_WUI layer will be considered the source and is designed ONLY for use with HFRA Fuels categorical exclusions, where HFRA WUI is legally required, and fiscal decisions, specifically funds granted in the Inflation Reduction Act.