Community Collaboration to Reduce Wildfire Losses in the Santa Monica Mountains

The Sustainable Defensible Space homepage.

Wildfires and extensive home losses have been a common feature of the Santa Monica Mountains for decades, but now the rest of the state of California is also seeing ever worsening losses. The need for homeowners in vulnerable locations to understand their risk from wildfire and how to reduce it has become urgent. Years of fire research in the Santa Monica Mountains has shown the overwhelming importance of home hardening and defensible space to prevent structure losses from wildfires.

The Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains, in partnership with the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, led a large collaborative effort to develop a new website that offers a holistic approach to ecologically sensitive defensible space. Defensiblespace.org focuses on the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area and Southern California, but much of its information is valuable for a statewide audience, including new representations of home hardening, landscaping plant lists and characteristics, specific maintenance guidelines, and community-wide considerations.

That this project filled a need is shown in the comments from one of our partners at LA County Fire: "As a professional in the field of creating defensible space around structures I found this to be one of the most clear, concise yet thorough sources of information on the web. I love the focus on the structure first, and then working outwards into the landscape. So many times the structure itself is missed in publications or sites of this nature. I like your site so much I have added it to my email signature and will try and get our Forestry Division Chief to add it to the LA County Fire Fuel Modification and Brush Clearance webpages. Thank you for taking the time to put this site together."