Overstory’s Wildfire Intelligence provides a foundational view of the controllable hazards in and around a utility’s right-of-way which drive wildfire risk in order to support prioritized mitigation activities and defensible, optimized programs.
Fuel Detection Model
Overstory’s Fuel Detection Model provides the highest fidelity fuel base map on the market, and delivers insight on spread risk based on that map. Overstory uses 30-centimeter resolution satellite and aerial imagery to identify the fuel type present at every pixel within a corridor around each power line span.
Updated annually to ensure operational value of identified fuels
10,000x better resolution than public maps like LANDFIRE
Regionally trained to reflect local conditions and identify local concerns
How fuel hazard is measured
Wildfire Intelligence then calculates a fuel hazard index that reflects how dangerous the local fuel arrangement is. This index accounts for several factors:
Base fire intensity. Fuels that produce taller flames receive a higher base hazard weight.
Fuel diversity. When multiple fuel types are present near a span, fire behavior becomes more complex and often more dangerous.
Fuel adjacency. Certain combinations of fuel types next to each other are particularly dangerous. For example, grass next to shrub creates a "ladder" where fast-spreading grass fire can transition into taller, more intense shrub fire.
Fuel continuity. A continuous bed of fuel allows fire to spread uninterrupted. Fragmented fuel (patches of vegetation separated by non-burnable areas such as bare ground or rock) limits fire spread.
Span-Level Insights
Overstory’s Wildfire Intelligence combines fuel, vegetation and other data sources across each span analysed in order to identify where hazards are concentrated and increase wildfire risk.
Prioritization (P1–P5): Each span assigned a priority tier based on fuel and vegetation characteristics for targeted inspection and mitigation planning.
Fuel Distribution: Spatial breakdown of fuel types across scanned spans, identifying where combustible vegetation is concentrated and contiguous.
Fuel-Driven Spread Potential Map: Continuous raster layer representing fuel hazard intensity across the network.
Network Group Insights
At the network group level, Wildfire Intelligence combines all individual hazards with exposure and consequence data to quantify and compare wildfire risk across the utility network.
Aggregated Burnability: Network-wide burnability score that rolls up span-level risk into circuit, region, or territory views for executive reporting and program planning.
Quantified exposure metrics: Financial exposure estimate quantifying the potential cost impact of wildfire risk across the network; supports business case development and budget prioritization.
Top Drivers of Burnability: Ranked analysis of the vegetation characteristics most responsible for network-wide burnability, guiding where mitigation investment has the greatest impact.
Fuel Distribution (Network Group View): Territory-wide fuel distribution patterns, enabling comparison across circuits and identification of high-concentration zones.
How Overstory calculates wildfire risk
Overstory expresses wildfire risk in expected annual dollars of damage, following the standard enterprise risk formulation: risk = likelihood × consequence.
Likelihood is our burnability index, which combines two inputs: fuel hazard and vegetation hazard. Fuel hazard captures how readily the vegetation along a span will ignite and carry fire, based on fuel model classification and moisture-driven flammability. Vegetation hazard captures structural characteristics of the corridor that amplify or dampen that baseline, including canopy continuity and height. The burnability index is computed at the span level, giving each segment of line its own score rather than inheriting a regional average.
Consequence is drawn directly from FEMA's National Risk Index (NRI) wildfire expected annual loss values, which encode community-level exposure, vulnerability, and historic loss estimates for wildfire events.
Multiplying burnability by consequence yields a per-span annualized risk value in dollars. Spans and circuits are then ranked on that value and bucketed into the color scale shown on the map, from gray for lower-risk segments through yellow to red for higher ones. The dollar thresholds between buckets are calibrated to each utility's service territory.