FEC: Good Fire: Enhance Spatial and Temporal Efficacy of Prescribed Fire and Managed Wildfire Use

About This Grant

This project will advance knowledge and create tools to support prescribed burns and managed wildfire use to address the wildfire crisis in the western U.S. It will also help train the skilled workforce needed to mitigate wildfire impacts. The project will close use-inspired research gaps on key wildfire mitigation strategies identified by decision-makers. These include social barriers, economic effects on communities, impacts on water systems, and ecological outcomes. A team from across Idaho, New Mexico, and Oklahoma will lead this work, with expertise in social science, economics, ecology, geoscience, engineering, computer science, and arts. Boise State will lead the effort in partnership with the University of New Mexico, Navajo Technical University, Northwest Nazarene University and University of Oklahoma. Finally, this project will develop research, education, and outreach capacity at a range of institutions to support national goals in disaster resilience and artificial intelligence. This project will investigate feedbacks between prescribed burns and wildfire use—collectively referred to as managed fires—and socio-environmental systems. It will generate novel, use-inspired insights into multi-dimensional, multi-sector impacts of managed fires. The research will integrate advanced statistical methods, machine learning, and ecosystem modeling with in-situ observations and mixed-methods approaches to assess watershed-scale hydrologic outcomes, optimize ecological benefits, quantify economic impacts, and identify social barriers to the adoption of managed fires. Outcomes will include the identification and optimization of spatial and temporal opportunities for managed fires, along with the delivery of accessible, decision-support tools and information to key decision-makers. The project will enhance research infrastructure in three EPSCoR states by developing a skilled workforce in wildfire mitigation. Research activities will integrate education and outreach initiatives by supporting training in fire science and artificial intelligence and fostering partnerships with agency stakeholders. This transdisciplinary approach will provide scalable solutions to reduce wildfire risks and strengthen societal and environmental resilience. This project is supported by the EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Program: Focused EPSCoR Collaborations Program (FEC), which supports interjurisdictional teams of EPSCoR investigators to perform research in topics that align with NSF priorities, with the goals of driving discovery and building sustainable STEM capacity. 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.