Local firefighters are now using new technology to track which areas of the state are especially vulnerable to wildfires.
It's called aerial mapping and it's been used to map the nearly 20 million acres of forests in Washington state since the 1940s. But now workers with the Department of Natural Resources are putting that mapping technology to use during wildfire season.
DNR's primary goal in aerial mapping is to look for insect infestations, or dead trees. They're mapping from an airplane, and it's not a perfect science, but workers are able to use it to spot trends. "If we do that annually, we can track the trends, whether it's increasing or reducing," said Glenn Kohler, a DNR entomologist, about infestations.