The Geography of Social Vulnerability and Wildfire Risk across Wyoming

Wildfire is Wyoming’s most prevalent disaster: since 1980, fires have accounted for more than 68% of all disaster declarations in the state, and recent seasons have broken historical records for acres burned. But the impacts of wildfire are not evenly distributed. Populations with fewer economic resources, limited mobility, or reduced access to social support face compounded risks — both greater exposure and diminished capacity to prepare, evacuate, and recover. Understanding where those populations live, and where their locations overlap with the highest fire hazard, is essential for targeting mitigation resources where they are most needed.

This project develops the first Wyoming-specific Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI), tailored to the distinctive conditions of a rural, resource-dependent, low-density state that national indices were not designed to capture. Standard approaches like the CDC/ATSDR SVI rely on indicator sets developed for general national application; they tend to underweight factors that matter acutely in Wyoming — including reliance on natural resource industries, agricultural employment, remoteness from services, and the particular dynamics of small-town economies. The Wyoming SoVI is built from the ground up using local Census data, theory-driven indicator selection, and principal component analysis, with expert elicitation used to validate and refine the resulting index.

The spatial analysis maps the Wyoming SoVI against wildfire hazard data across all 23 counties and 132 census tracts in the state, using bivariate spatial autocorrelation methods to identify clusters where high social vulnerability and high fire risk coincide — the places of greatest compounded risk and highest planning priority. The index is also compared directly with national measures to document where and how Wyoming-specific patterns diverge from what standard tools would predict.

A sensitivity analysis tests whether the index’s findings hold across spatial scales (county vs. census tract) and over time, assessing whether the overlap between social vulnerability and fire risk has grown in recent years as wildfire seasons have intensified. The work forms the core of Sandip Pantha’s MS thesis and is a foundation for a planned JFSP graduate project application.