Global Centers Track 2: Enabling interdisciplinary wildfire research for community resilience

One of the most consequential climate change-related outcomes in the western US is the rapid increase in wildfire frequency and size. Over the last two decades, wildfires increasingly have moved from wildlands into human communities. The impacts of these wildfires on communities includes losses of and damages to civil infrastructure. These losses and damages have become increasingly complex due to the increasing interconnectedness of the global economy and dependencies among infrastructure systems. This Global Centers Track 2 Design award aims to develop an international, interdisciplinary center that will contribute to solving societal challenges to mitigate, adapt to, and recover from the effects of wildfires on physical, social, and economic infrastructure. Addressing the cumulative effects of wildfires, including those on social and economic systems, crosses disciplines and jurisdictional boundaries and requires collaboration among social, economic, and technical sectors. Award activities are designed to build scientific and community capacity and include scenario building, community engagement, and training and workforce development. The award is a partnership among Oregon State University, University of Oregon, and University of Washington in the U.S. with multiple universities in Australia and the United Kingdom. This project would fill gaps in knowledge of methods for reducing the risk of infrastructure losses and the multiple barriers to mitigation actions by land management agencies, local government, and residents. It will foster a co-production of knowledge by using scenario-based exercise and considering engineering aspects (e.g., material properties), data-driven decision-making framework, post-fire Lidar data, and multi-hazard impacts on community infrastructure. The results of this research will advance or identify research questions to further knowledge of wildfire impacts on connected infrastructure systems, communities, and natural, cultural, social, political, financial, and built environments. The identification of these connections will lead to the development of a transformational convergent research vision, which will be outlined in a Track 1 proposal. This research vision will (i) identify sector-specific impacts of wildfires, as well as their connections and interdependencies; (ii) develop models that illustrate such impacts and evaluate mitigation, response, and recovery strategies, and (iii) identify opportunities to engage sensing technology to quantify fire demands within communities and use sensing data to validate modeling methodologies. The identification of these connections will also enable further research development on the wildland urban interface by groups of interdisciplinary scientists and engineers. This award is funded by the Global Centers program, an innovative program that supports use-inspired research addressing global challenges related to climate change and/or clean energy. Track 2 design awards support U.S.-based researchers to bring together international teams to develop research questions and partnerships, conduct landscape analyses, synthesize data, and/or build multi-stakeholder networks to advance their use-inspired research at larger scale in the future. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.