Restricted Research - Award List, Note/Discussion Page
Fiscal Year: 2023
120 University of North Texas (142008)
Principal Investigator: Schumann,Ronald L
Total Amount of Contract, Award, or Gift (Annual before 2011): $ 205,867
Exceeds $250,000 (Is it flagged?): No
Start and End Dates: 12/15/22 - 9/2/25
Restricted Research: YES
Academic Discipline: Emergency Mgmt & Disaster Sci
Department, Center, School, or Institute: Col of Health & Public Servic
Title of Contract, Award, or Gift: Fueling resilience: A risk-based comparison of post-fire programs and recovery outcomes in Northern California
Name of Granting or Contracting Agency/Entity:
USDA Forest Service
CFDA: 10.707
Program Title: none
Note:
After destructive wildfire, residents and communities take stock of their altered landscape and decide how to rebuild, while ecological communities restructure, regrow, and are transformed through management and restoration. Viewed through a socio-ecological lens, recovery involves not only returning human communities and ecosystems to functional levels, but ultimately increasing their resilience to fire over the long-term. The recovery period after fire presents an opportunity when governments, communities, and residents can embrace resilience through household and landscape-level management interventions that reduce the risk of future wildfire losses (e.g., prescribed burns, mechanical vegetation removal, grazing programs, risk-based land use planning, new building standards). This study examines the effectiveness of post-fire interventions in two adjacent California counties both recovering from repetitive wildfires but with differing levels of local capacity: Lake County (low resource/capacity) and Sonoma County (high resource/capacity). Research objectives for the study are as follows: 1. Document the method, timing, and spatial extent of wildfire risk reduction efforts during recovery (2015-present). 2. Determine how these risk reduction efforts resulted from resources and programs available to communities. 3. Model the potential risk reduction outcomes of recovery efforts, combining ecological and social data to examine resilience to future wildfire losses 4. Synthesize the qualitative and quantitative findings of our research to identify keys to enhance social-ecological resilience. The study will utilize semi-structured interviews with community leaders, local government officials, land developers, and homebuilders to document specific post-fire risk reduction efforts in the built and natural environments (Objective 1). Interviews will ask stakeholders about the perceived effectiveness of these efforts, document their programmatic origins, and inform the collection of quantitative and geospatial data on their impacts (Objectives 1 & 2). Quantitative datasets produced will initialize a modeling exercise to discern changes in wildfire risk given a handful of potential wildfire scenarios in each county (Objective 3). Finally, qualitative (interview) and quantitative (modeling) findings will be synthesized in a series of community workshops to identify interventions, or combinations of interventions, that most contributed to wildfire resilience in each county (Objective 4).
Discussion: No discussion notes