Public Administration professor Branda Nowell of NC State’s School of International and Public Affairs, along with associate dean for research at the College of Natural Resources Robert Scheller, and associate professor Jelena Vukomanovic of the Center for Geospatial Analytics at NC State, were awarded an NSF Fire Grant to build a transdisciplinary research and education community aimed to address the rapidly changing risks of wildfires in the Eastern United States. Each will serve as a co-principal investigator. 

Entitled, “Collaborative Research: Eastern Fire-Net: Frontiers in Understanding Novel Fire Systems in Eastern US,” (NSF Grant PAM-P26-000012), NC State was awarded nearly $200,000 of a much greater $1.5 million national grant that tackles the future of wildfire management in the Eastern United States. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations that will result from this study are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. 

In recent years, the Eastern United States has entered into a new era of wildfire risk, due to merging interactions among climate extremes, shifting vegetation, dense wildland-urban intermix, and complex governance structures.  Although the East is generally considered to have a low fire hazard, recent wildfires – such as those in Gatlinburg, Tenn., Louisiana, Long Island, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania — are happening against a background of increasingly tense and frequent wet and dry extremes. Because the eastern public is not historically conditioned to consider wildfire threats, and because there are small land parcels and a tight intermingling of different land governance systems in the area, it is important to develop a sustainable wildfire management plan that can address the complex systems and need for public education. 

The proposed Eastern Fire Network (EFNet) aims to fill the gap of a coordinated research infrastructure capable of addressing the rapidly changing risk landscape in the eastern U.S. by: 

• Integrating large-scale atmospheric, ecological and social datasets to evaluate the relative influence of weather extremes, fuels, and human drivers on fire occurrence 
• Developing new frameworks for assessing community exposure and vulnerability across diverse Eastern geographies, and
• Identifying context-specific management and policy strategies that enhance resilience. 

Through coordinated science-practitioner collaborations, comparative case studies, machine-learning-enabled data synthesis and a graduate summer fellowship program, EFNet will generate the knowledge base necessary to support proactive planning and reduce future wildland fire impacts. By uniting regional expertise across jurisdictional boundaries and remaining aligned with national cohesive fire management goals, the network will lay the foundation for a sustained Eastern U.S. wildland fire research agenda that is responsive to escalating risks. 

The EFNET core team will work with existing regional networks in the EAST, including Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) Fire Science Exchanges, the Northeast and Southeast Regional Strategy Committees of the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy, the South East Firemap (SE Firemap), and State-level regional prescribed fire councils. 

At NC State, Dr. Nowell will work with the multi-institutional project team on research design and implementation aimed at advancing our understanding of how the Eastern U.S.  institutional context varies from a more traditionally studied Western U.S. context, and how to reduce socio-environmental wildfire risks and impacts.  Dr. Nowell will also help lead a Graduate Summer Fellowship Program in Transdisciplinary Wildland Fire Science.

The EF-NET will be led through the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State University’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, with Distinguished Professor of Geography and Director of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute Erica A.H. Smithwick serving as principal investigator.