Planning: Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure-1 Community-scale Testbeds to Accelerate Climate Adaptation and Disaster Reduction Research

This grant supports the planning for a new, shared-use, place-based testbed for research on community resilience to climate change and natural hazards. The testbed is a cyber-physical environment representative of community systems and can be used for policy design, model integration, and theory development. Longitudinal and cross-sectional datasets being collected and curated are essential to examining loss, recovery, and mitigation in communities subject to natural hazards. In addition, these datasets form empirical evidence for timely and equitable adaptation solutions to climate change. Establishing such a testbed fills a critical gap in integration and coordination of multiple longitudinal studies across geographies and hazards. It captures the complexity of real-world sociotechnical drivers and resources constraints. The planning effort focuses on key building blocks of a Mid-scale Research Infrastructure, soliciting feedback on research priorities, enablers for scientific breakthroughs to refine the testbed’s scope and governance structure. A series of workshops, conference sessions, and surveys target both researchers and community users. The project team learns from other research infrastructures and explores synergy with the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI). 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.