Exploring social foundations that support community preparedness for wildfire

A community's vulnerability to wildfires is a function of social and ecological factors. There are steps that agencies and individuals in a community can take to increase preparedness against wildfires. This paper presents an overview of the model of community preparedness used and tested in the study "Community partnerships: Landscape level strategies to reduce the risk and loss from catastrophic fires." The preliminary results of this study shed light on actions that some communities are taking to be prepared for wildfires and the social foundations that support these actions. The second section of the paper focuses on social capital, one of the social factors that impacts preparedness initiatives.