Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Wildfire Hazard Resilience and Risk Engineering (WiRE)

Wildfires keep scorching the physical, social, economic, and health fabric of our communities, leaving us overwhelmed with the devastating scale and consequences of this perennial hazard. The recent wildfire events have been a clarion call for advancing, developing, and implementing science-based technological solutions to enhance wildfire resilience.

Unfortunately, the present research and educational efforts in relevant fields are currently siloed—both in terms of organizational and scientific domain focus—, demanding the integration of the presently disconnected efforts into a unified whole. Inspired by decades of experience in natural hazard engineering, the proposed ERC on Wildfire hazard Resilience and risk Engineering (WiRE) aims to advance and converge the scientific domains to develop a paradigm-shifting risk- and resilience-based research infrastructure for wildfire hazard engineering.

Through engaging stakeholder communities, problem owners, and industry partners, we envision the transformation of integrated scientific research into practical engineering-based technology solutions for wildfire hazard prediction, mitigation, response, and recovery.

The ERC vision requires a convergence of thinking modalities from risk engineering and resilience, fire science, climate science, natural science, computation and data science, sensors and robotics, system engineering, social science, environmental science, economics and finance, and public health and policy disciplines. Primary deliverables of the ERC will be (i) a convergent engineering solution framework for wildfire risk management and resilience, (ii) new scientific knowledge in domain-specific focus areas towards the convergent whole, (iii) an integrated open-source computational platform for multi-scale probabilistic wild- and WUI-fire risk management, and (iv) development of new wildfire engineering curriculum and educational plans to cross-train the future workforce.

The first step towards this vision is to delineate the coupled attributes of the wildfire hazard domain and orchestrate the multi-disciplinary thinking modalities towards a convergent solution, which the present ERC planning grant will address.

The planning grant will engage a broad network of academics and stakeholders to advance our understanding of the multi-dimensional problem domain of wildfire hazards. The convergence of multi-disciplinary domain knowledge will illuminate the roadmap for scientific research advancement, technology development, user-centric implementation, and educational plan, which will be executed through the WiRE ERC.

The objectives of this planning grant are to (i) identify pain points, research gaps, and solution needs, (ii) develop a collaborative and convergent scientific research and technology development plan, (iii) recruit domain leaders and form subdomain research squads, and (iv) outreach and onboard broader stakeholder community. The planning grant execution starts with a series of joint research-stakeholder virtual coffee calls to identify the problem domain.

The outcome of the virtual calls will be a draft of research and technology development plans. We will then organize a workshop with breakout sessions to converge and refine the research and technology development plans and identify key domain leaders and stakeholder liaisons. The workshop will be followed by a series of joint domain-leader virtual coffee-hour calls to craft the ERC scope and action plan. Finally, the ERC proposal will be created through several write-shops.

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.