Funded Projects

Wildfires are a natural part of many natural ecosystems including savanna, shrubland, and forests. However, due to the changing climate, expansion of human activities, and inadequate fuel management, wildfires increasingly spread into urban communities. Consequently, the economic and social impacts of wildfires have been rising in recent years and now represent a global concern. Significant research has been conducted to understand wildfire behavior in wildland areas. In parallel, fire spread models have been developed within the wildland-urban interface communities leveraging the heritage from post-earthquake fire models. There is a significant knowledge gap on the changes in wildfire frequency and spread patterns considering the interaction between expanding communities and the wildland. We hypothesize that the frequencies of wildfire burning in both ecosystems and nearby urban communities are changing due to climate and land use changes. To test this hypothesis in a highly coupled social-ecological system such as Southern California, the proposed research involves (1) delineating the dynamic changes of boundaries between wildlands and human communities and (2) understanding the spatiotemporal changing patterns of wildfire propagation using climatological, ecological, and socioeconomic features. This proposal meets the requirement for the first type of the Coins for funding a Collaborative Trio (cT). The proposed project includes three Coin-holders affiliated with two different departments (Khorasani and Sun from CSEE and Wilson from Geography and Environment and Sustainability) and is different from participants' externally funded projects. This collaboration enables studying the coupling of natural and human factors of wildfire behaviour, which is a novel research project.