FIRE-WUI: Emerging Wildfire Hazards in High-Biomass Forests and Community Adaptation

Wildfires are increasingly affecting places that many residents have long considered fire-resistant, including the productive temperate rainforests of western Oregon and Washington. As population growth and development expand the wildland–urban interface, communities in such high-biomass forests face growing and often unfamiliar risks, including fast-moving fires, evacuations, smoke exposure, property damage, and disruption to local economies and public health. This project will help communities anticipate and adapt to these emerging wildfire hazards. Working directly with wildfire practitioners, planners, agencies, and community partners, the research team will identify effective forest management, home hardening, defensible space, and community planning strategies to support both near-term risk reduction and long-term adaptation. The project will improve public safety, support decision-making by community organizations and land management agencies, build capacity among wildfire researchers and practitioners, and produce practical resources such as toolkits, workshops, webinars, and reports for wildfire professionals in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. The project goals are to understand emerging wildfire hazards in high-biomass temperate forests and how communities can adapt to them. The project also aims to build the capacity and strengthen the workforce of wildfire researchers and practitioners. The research objectives are to (1) define new wildfire regimes; (2) identify physical and ecological constraints on fire behavior; (3) assess mitigation practices for wildland–urban interface communities; (4) identify features of effective wildfire governance systems; and (5) identify psychosocial factors that influence the adoption of new practices and their implementation at scale (transformational adaptation). The broader impact objectives are to (6) develop resources to support risk decision-making; and (7) build the capacity of researchers and practitioners to conduct collaborative research on complex wildfire problems. The activities will include creating spatial databases of climate, vegetation, topography, land use, housing, ignitions, and fire history; developing and applying AI-enhanced models to identify emerging fire regimes, evaluate landscape constraints and mitigation scenarios, and accelerate community-scale fire modeling; analyzing local governance systems through document review, interviews, and case studies; and surveying households to understand how experience, place attachment, risk perception, and participation in planning affect willingness to adopt new mitigation practices. A key feature of the approach is the integration of natural science, engineering, social science, and practitioner knowledge. Adaptation resources will be co-produced with practitioners. The project will focus on the “Westside” forests of western Washington and northwestern Oregon. 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.