Planning: FIRE-PLAN: Community Building Toward an Immersive Forest Network to Catalyze Wildland Fire Solutions and Training

One way to proactively address the wildfire crisis is by increasing the resilience of our landscapes through vegetation treatments such as prescribed fires. The outcomes of a prescribed fire depend largely on fuel structure. Yet, many fire models currently are limited to two-dimensional sources of data, and also provide two-dimensional outputs that do not capture important fire dynamics. A key shift is underway in fire models and management: a shift from two-dimensional (2D) to three-dimensional (3D) fire modeling tools. This planning effort lays the foundation for sensing pathways and workflows to improve the characterization of fuels at large spatial extents and fine spatial scales to enhance the representation of fire in modeling and forecasting. Immersive visualizations of fuel and fire modeling will be shared at the World Design Capital 2024 Pavilion in San Diego, California. A series of meetings among a diverse set of stakeholders paves the way for real-time, immersive visualization of scientific data and the AI-readiness of these datasets toward new modes of training, decision making, and public communication related to wildland fire management, including prescribed fires. Overall, the project aims to: (1) identify current gaps in fuel structure representation in models, (2) prototype a workflow from field data collection to fuel and fire models to visualizations of modeling outputs, (3) build real-world use cases with diverse communities, and (4) plan for a national-scale Immersive Forest and Wildland Fire Management Network. 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.