Turning Data into Action. An R Package for the Wildfire Resilience Index

Wildfires pose escalating risks to communities and ecosystems across western North America, requiring integrated resilience strategies that account for both social and environmental dimensions. The Western Wildfire Resilience Index (WRI) quantifies resilience across eight domains — Infrastructure, Communities, Livelihoods, Sense of Place, Species, Habitats, Water, and Air — providing a spatially explicit framework for identifying vulnerabilities and strengths at 90-meter resolution across twelve western U.S. states, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory. Despite its utility, the WRI's underlying data comprise 82 geospatial layers totaling approximately 25 gigabytes, creating a substantial barrier for researchers and practitioners who lack the storage, bandwidth, and geospatial processing capacity to work with the dataset locally. This project addresses this accessibility gap by converting the WRI archive to Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF format, hosting it on the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity, and developing firex, an open-source R package that allows users to query and retrieve spatial subsets of WRI data without downloading the full dataset. The package provides functions to browse the layer catalog, inspect per-layer metadata, and retrieve data cropped to a user-defined area of interest via bounding box or polygon input. By removing local storage and processing requirements, firex makes WRI data usable on any machine that runs R, supporting broader use of wildfire resilience metrics in research, planning, and decision-making across the region.