Assessing and adaptively managing wildfire risk in the wildland-urban interface for future climate and landuse changes

The FIRECLIM project will develop a coupled natural–human systems model of the complex socio–ecological interactions among climate change, economic growth, land development and policy, wildfire, and wildfire risk in the WUI, and demonstrate how the community of interest can use the model to adaptively manage wildfire risk in response to future climate change and economic growth.

See the project website at http://projects.cares.missouri.edu/fireclim-montana/ for more information.

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS (Staff)

Robert E. Keane, Research Ecologist and Deputy Program Manager; Director of the Fire Modeling Institute; Supervisory Research Ecologist; Jane Kapler Smith, Ecologist, FEIS Lead; Rachel A. Loehman, Research Ecologist

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS

Tony Prato, University of Missouri Center for Applied Research and Environmental Systems
Dan Fagre, USGS Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center
Gamini Herath, Deakin University, Victoria, Australia

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

The primary goals of the project are to: 1) advance knowledge of how climate change, economic growth and associated residential development, and the decisions made by agents in the community of interest (i.e., land and wildland fire management agencies, homeowners, land developers/homebuilders, and community/regional planners) influence wildfire and wildfire risk in the wildland-urban interface (WUI); and 2) increase understanding of these relationships by the broader community (i.e., students, members of the public who do not actively make decisions that influence wildfires and wildfire risk, and information personnel for state- and federally-managed forests, parks, and wildlife refuges).

The research objectives of the project are to: 1) develop a coupled natural–human systems model of the complex socio–ecological interactions among climate change, economic growth, land development and policy, wildfire, and wildfire risk in the WUI, and demonstrate how the community of interest can use the model to adaptively manage wildfire risk in the WUI in response to future climate change and economic growth; 2) test several hypotheses about how future residential development and land use policy influence future wildfire risk in the WUI in the study area; and 3) create a Web–based, interactive, spatial decision support tool that facilitates application of real–time adaptive management for wildfire risk in the study area and throughout the U.S.

FUNDING ORGANIZATION

The project is funded by the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems program of the U.S. National Science Foundation (http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07598/nsf07598.htm).