California Fire Protection Responsibility Areas

California's State Responsibility Areas dataset delineates lands where CAL FIRE has legal responsibility for fire protection, including State, Federal, and Local Responsibility Areas. The data undergoes a thorough 5-year review cycle and annual updates for changes like city annexations and federal land transfers. The latest version as of August 2025 is SRA 25_2.

Use Cases

• Analyze the spatial distribution of State Responsibility Areas (SRA) versus Local Responsibility Areas (LRA) for resource allocation planning.
• Model fire risk by integrating SRA designations with other geospatial layers based on land ownership and population density criteria.
• Track changes in Federal Responsibility Areas (FRA) over time using updates from the annual CWCG Direct Protection Area agreement process.

Strengths

• Data is maintained on a formal 5-year review cycle with annual updates, ensuring regular refinement.
• Updates incorporate specific, documented changes like city annexations, federal land transfers, and error corrections.
• Provided by the authoritative State of California organization responsible for fire protection policy.

Limitations

• The specific number of geographic features (rows) and attribute columns is not disclosed, limiting pre-analysis assessment of scale and detail.
• As a legal and administrative boundary dataset, it may not reflect real-time on-the-ground conditions or vegetation-based fire risk.

Provenance

Source

State of California, CAL FIRE.

Collection Method

Defined based on legal statutes considering land ownership, population density, and land use; updated through formal review and agreement processes.

Time Range

Current version represents data as of August 2025 (SRA 25_2).

Freshness

Updated annually; last update recorded on March 23, 2026.

Geography

State of California, United States.