NSF Award
2418792
Flash floods impact communities throughout the US each year, causing loss of life, property, and livelihoods. Rural communities, especially those in the economically disadvantaged Appalachian region, are particularly vulnerable to flash floods. This, in part, is due to the limited infrastructure to understand, predict, and prepare for flash floods in these regions. Additionally, the understanding of how climate change and landscape alterations affect flash floods is limited. To address these challenges, the project will bring together civil engineers, environmental scientists, and social scientists from the University of Louisville, West Virginia University, University of Kentucky, Marshall University, and Eastern Kentucky University working alongside community research partners from the region. A key outcome will be an improved ability to understand, predict, and prepare for flash floods under climate change. This will be achieved with new models, strategically placed sensors, regional flood analyses, and insight from those most affected by flash floods, community members. Researchers and community members will work together to identify specific issues related to flash floods, such as flooding knickpoints and locations where models may perform poorly. By integrating engineering, environmental science, and social science, this project will create solutions tailored to community goals, serving as a model for resilience planning in vulnerable communities across the US. The project's workforce development plan will guide over 500 underrepresented middle and high school students in the Appalachian region through college and into their careers. Activities will include field experiences, tree plantings, and environmental sensor trainings. The project will also connect communities across Appalachia to address future climate change through knowledge exchange workshops. This plan will be put into action with the help of community partners throughout Appalachia, including local citizens, non-profit organizations, and watershed associations. <br/><br/>Flash flooding has caused the highest number of fatalities of any flood type in the last two decades. Communities in central Appalachia are especially vulnerable to flash floods. The goal of this project is to gain fundamental knowledge of flash flooding under climate change and mitigate its impacts in vulnerable rural communities by advancing research capacity, interdisciplinary collaboration, and scientific literacy across Kentucky and West Virginia EPSCoR jurisdictions. Using increased hydrologic research infrastructure and an evidence-based community engagement model, the project will integrate three research tasks to meet this goal: 1) advance the hydrologic sciences to understand controls of flash floods in disturbed and forested stream systems; 2) facilitate community-engaged research to increase resilience and flash flood technology uptake; and 3) develop a community-led science model for increasing knowledge of flash floods. The project will couple catchment-scale hydrologic models (process-based, machine learning), on-the-ground data collection, regional flooding analysis, and hydrologic sensing technology with evidence-based participatory action research to co-create new flash flood knowledge, tools, technology, and subsequently, tailored solutions. The project will provide insight into how climate change manifests in heavily disturbed landscapes across the US; how to measure, monitor, model, and predict flash flooding with sufficient time for communities to respond in understudied and infrequently monitored headwater systems; what current and future flash flood risks look like in stream-adjacent communities like those found throughout central Appalachia; and how researchers, community members, and government and industry partners can co-produce knowledge, tools, and technology that align with community goals. This project will build a novel collaboration among university, community, government, and industry constituencies that will serve as a model for community resilience planning and advancing the knowledge-to-action paradigm. By connecting communities through the creation of micro-region groups and networks, the project will create more diverse and connected engagement across Appalachia to address climate change. This project is funded by the EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement-Focused EPSCoR Collaborations (RII-FEC) program. The RII-FEC program builds inter-jurisdictional collaborative teams of EPSCoR investigators in focus areas consistent with the NSF Strategic Plan. RII-FEC projects include researchers from at least two EPSCoR eligible jurisdictions with complementary expertise and resources necessary to address challenges, which neither party could address as well or as rapidly independently.<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.
