NSF Award
2333294
In the United States, the adjusted impacts of wildfires exceeded $100 B over the past 22 years. A community resilient to wildland fires can prepare for anticipated scenarios, take mitigating actions, adapt to changing conditions, minimize losses during the response to an event, and rapidly recover. Scientists with San José State University Wildfire Interdisciplinary Center (WIRC), an Industry University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC), are working together with Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) researchers to holistically investigate wildfires. Broader impacts include improved response to wildfires, especially in the areas of decision making; determining risk; ensuring reliable electrical grid operations and informing decisions on grid cutoff; minimizing loss of life and property; and providing more effective warnings and prognostication to populations living in areas susceptible to wildfire. The Center is training the STEM workforce to become fire managers, city planners, fire analysts, and fire meteorologists. The collaboration will increase the numbers of students trained in wildfire research, diversify the types of training students receive, and increase student’s potential for internships from a broader group of companies. Both institutions will conduct active outreach using their campus programs to increase the diversity of trained students. Finally, the partnership extends the reach of WIRC to the east coast where fire frequency and extreme fires are also increasing. Collectively, the Center is conducting high-impact wildfire research to provide new predictive tools and strategies to communities and industry stakeholders, including first responders, risk analysts, policymakers, companies, and utilities. <br/><br/>By partnering with WPI, a new IUCRC Partner Site to WIRC, the collective team will address several key topics synergistic with the Center’s ongoing wildfire prediction, preparation, and prevention efforts. For example, WPI adds critical research depth to address human safety and community resilience to wildfire, including fire safety at the wildland-urban interface; small-scale fire behavior; fire impact at the fire-front level; fire protection systems, and firefighter safety. Improvements in understanding of fire spread through different layers of vegetation, the characterization of firebrands produced by a fire-burning vegetation or structure, the generation of reliable fire behavior data used to train AI models, and the study of the fundamental fire-front level processes to drive extreme fire behavior are critically needed to improve our ability to understand and model wildfire. Because of its emphasis on fire protection, WPI will study new fire detection methods, robotics solutions to enhance first responders’ safety, and fire suppression systems for wildfires. Its state-of-the-art Fire Protection Lab provides equipment to conduct experiments, enabling researchers to extract fundamental measurements of fire ignition and conflagration.<br/><br/>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.
