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Finding Our Place Strategic Planning Areas The Applegate Fire Plan addresses the entire 500,000 acres of the Applegate watershed, with its more than 12,000 residents, two counties, and two states, an area with great variation in landscapes and differing degrees of fire hazard and population density. All these factors brought up a problem as we began formulating this plan: what scale to use, both for overall analysis and for local fuel strategies or emergency communications. Although we sometimes refer to a map of the whole Applegate watershed to help show its variations, the Interdisciplinary (ID) Team for the fire plan found it needed smaller areas to more effectively analyze current conditions. The Emergency Communications component also needed smaller neighborhood-sized areas for devising telephone trees, and fuel reduction strategies needed to be developed on a local level, for social as well as ecological reasons. Therefore, we broke the so-called "4th field" Applegate River watershed into nineteen areas using both "5th field" and smaller "6th field" watershed lines. (Think of these areas as the Apple-gate River basin with its sub basins and their sub-sub basins.) These lines follow drainage contours and so make biological sense for analysis. They also work fairly well for fuel reduction strategies, since fire most often travels up a valley or gulch. Examples of this size watershed would be Thompson Creek, Yale Creek, and Cheney Creek. There are actually thirty-eight "6th field" watersheds within the Applegate River's drainage, and we combined a few, especially where there were either not enough residents (as in the Carberry /Steve/Sturgis/O'Brien areas of the upper drainage) or if a drainage line split a community (as in Ruch). The map page shows these 19 areas that we are calling Strategic Planning Areas (SPAs). These SPAs will be used throughout most of our Applegate Fire Plan for the fuels reduction, fire suppression, and emergency communications sections. This will be an easy reference for you to find your neighborhood - your "place."