As an active wildfire season gets underway in Florida, a pair of UF School of Forest, Fisheries, & Geomatics Sciences professors are leading UF’s effort as part of the multi-institutional effort known as the Eastern Fire Network (EFNet).
“We are part of a transdisciplinary team of partners across five universities and institutes throughout the eastern United States that have come together to respond to this growing challenge of increasing wildfire risk in the East,” Assistant Professor Carissa Wonkka said.
Grant funding for the project is at $1.74 million over three years, going to work led by Penn State, along with UF, the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Columbia University, the Global Council on Science and the Environment, N.C. State, and the Tall Timbers Research Station. Those dollars are coming from the National Science Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Buckminster Fuller Institute.
“(Assistant Professor) Tori (Donovan)’s research program has found that large wildfires are becoming more frequent in our region, and this is obviously accelerating our risks to communities and ecosystems and infrastructure,” Wonkka said.
The goal is co-producing actionable wildfire signs that directly support fire management and decisionmaking, allowing for continual research and experiments on it.
“We’ve tried to build a coordinated research agenda spanning ecology, climate science, social systems, and community vulnerability to ensure that our emerging science translates into meaningful solutions for places most at risk,” Wonkka said. “We’re doing this through a set of workshops where we’re going to bring in relevant partners — anywhere from land management to insurance to other scientists that are doing the work in this zone — and get together and talk about the research agenda.”
The first workshop is set for late spring or early summer at Tall Timbers in Leon County, then the group will meet at various places across the eastern U.S. to bring in more stakeholders and partners to achieve a more complete perspective on wildfire concerns, issues, and how to tackle them.
Another of the project elements is creating graduate research training for transdisciplinary wildland fire science in the eastern U.S.
“Our first transdisciplinary graduate research training opportunity will be taking place at Tall Timbers Research Station, with a focus on the Southeast,” Donovan said. “The theme is coexisting with fire in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). We’re hoping to get a well-rounded group of applicants from across the East that can work together to create innovative research questions to address growing wildfire risk in the WUI.”
EFNet will cover travel costs and provide stipends for students who participate.
The effort comes none too soon. Burn bans have been and are presently in effect across the state. The National Integrated Drought Information System spotlit Florida in a social media post Feb. 19, showing that a full two-thirds of the state, 67.4%, is in extreme drought.
Meanwhile, experts are predicting a fire season similar to 2011 — Florida endured 659 fires in the first two weeks of June that year.
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