RAISE: Establishing Wildfire-Resilient Communities

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

This project will show how fire spreads on a global scale and link that behavior to the local scale. Wildfire damage to infrastructure and ecosystems is rising. It is possible to coexist with wildfires if decision makers consider fire behavior and take adaptive approaches, such as wildland fuel reductions and community home hardening. Knowledge of where and when adaptive approaches are needed requires a clear understanding of how wildfire propagates at multiple scales under different weather scenarios. Although researchers have made a substantial effort to model wildfire behavior at different scales, until recently, they knew little about how fires behave once they enter communities. Wildfire propagation models offer a unique opportunity to link fire behaviors on the global scale all the way to the individual-building level in communities. Making this link will allow for more effective wildfire management that couples fuel reduction and home hardening strategies tailored to account for the physical, social, ecological, and economic characteristics of each community. This project will establish a framework to merge characteristics of the built environment with those of wildlands to improve models of fire risk in fire-prone communities. The research will start by linking wildfire models to simulate the behavior of fire at different scales - from a global domain to the community level. In addition, the approach to wildfire risk modeling will consider houses as drivers of fire, rather than simply recipients of fire. This will be achieved using a new community wildfire propagation model, AGNI-NAR – Asynchronous Graph Nexus Infrastructure for Network Assessment of Wildland-Urban Interface Risk. AGNI-NAR is as a decision-making tool that captures fire interaction between vegetation and structures to allow stakeholders to make informed wildfire fuel and home hardening decisions at the wildland, individual property, and community landscape levels. Recognizing that every community is unique, the project will seek to co-produce actionable solutions using the wildfire models through iterative engagement with key stakeholders in the study areas to identify socially acceptable mitigation scenarios. 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.