SCC-CIVIC-PG Track B: Low-Cost Efficient Wireless Intelligent Sensors (LEWIS) for Greater Preparedness and Resilience to Post-Wildfire Flooding in Native American Communities

The combined impacts of wildfires and post-wildfire flooding have changed the lives and landscapes of New Mexico’s Native American Communities for over 20-years. Native American communities, state and national agencies, university researchers, and other stakeholders have contributed to recovery efforts and initiated the difficult process of fundamentally changing existing approaches to building resilient communities and landscapes by learning from Pueblo partners.

Specifically, Pueblo communities have conveyed to the research team that they can benefit from designing and building their own sensor networks, as opposed to using commercial off-the-shelf sensors, which represents a paradigm shift and a novel approach to community resilience. This paradigm shift presents a new approach to enhancing community resilience where the sensor solutions are designed and built by the community.

In this proposal, Pueblo communities will design, build and implement their own Low-Cost Efficient Wireless Intelligent Sensors (LEWIS). These self-built distributed sensor networks will inform communities of trends and thresholds in landscapes that can assist in managing wildfires and providing early warning when fires and floods occur. This project's long-term vision is to develop a Nationwide community of practice that shares ideas, designs, and applications for resilience in Tribal communities by co-developing capacity and communications related to sensor networks and decision- support tools.

This collaboration will lead directly to new resilience indices, a pilot demonstration of an environmental sensor network, a blueprint for incorporating sensor data into decision-making platforms, and strategies for building community resilience. The vision for this pilot project is to create an example that catalyzes a user community of sensor technologies that contributes to increased resilience in Tribal communities.

In addition, this project will deliver a curriculum module on sensor technologies for environmental monitoring to high school students at the Santa Fe Indian School that demonstrates new, exciting technologies, and introducing career opportunities in STEM. Through this effort, Native American leaders will educate their youth on LEWIS as their own technology.

This project aims to contribute to the CIVIC program mission by addressing a critical need in the American Southwest – resilience to wildfires and post-wildfire floods among Tribal communities. The proposed research will contribute new knowledge and advance the area of S&CC through: (1) advancing understanding of the processes for, and outcomes of, co-generation of knowledge between Native American communities and academic researchers; (2) developing improved approaches for incorporating place-based knowledge in the co-development of resilience indices and decision-support platforms; and (3) exploring novel approaches to management, security, and data-sharing that supports the advancement of science, builds community resilience, and respects Native American communities’ concerns regarding data sovereignty.

This project is funded by CIVIC Innovation Challenge which includes a partnership with NSF, the Vehicle Technology Office in Department of Energy, and the Science and Technology Director of the Department of Homeland Security

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.