Brittany Brand
Boise State University, ID·Social Science
Wildfires have grown more frequent and destructive over the past four decades. Climate change is one driver.
- Fields
Social Science
Earth & Environmental Science
Engineering
- Topics
wildfire
wildland-urban interface
evacuation modeling
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Identify the factors that influence whether households in four wildland-urban interface communities adopt mitigation, stay-and-defend preparedness, or evacuation readiness, extending the Protective Action Decision Model.
- Test whether active-learning and goal-setting techniques and alternative warning messages increase residents' adoption of pre-fire protective actions.
- Integrate social-behavioral data into agent-based evacuation models that couple people, fire spread and traffic, and use them to evaluate alternative evacuation strategies with planners and emergency managers.
More about the research
Another is that more people now live in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), where homes meet wildland. Households can lower their risk before a fire by clearing or hardening property, preparing to stay and survive, or getting ready to evacuate. Yet it is not well understood why some households take these steps and others do not. Evacuation planning tools also rarely link people's behavior, fire spread and traffic together.
Why it matters
Residents and businesses in fire-prone areas where homes meet wildland could face lower risk if communities know which messages and programs motivate preparation. Better evacuation models could help emergency managers and planners choose safer evacuation strategies. The project expects to produce best practices and evidence to guide policy and resource allocation.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Tristan Lin
University of North Texas, TX·Social Science
Track how coastal households in 100-year flood zones turn intentions into flood protection behaviors, surveying them six times over three years based on Paton's Social-Cognitive Preparation Model.
Jennifer Henderson
Texas Tech University, TX·Social Science
Understand how individuals assess their own risk and decide to take protective action as flash floods and other weather hazards develop, using a human-centered approach.
Hemant Purohit
George Mason University, VA·Computer Science
Build a dynamic knowledge graph using probabilistic graphical models that combines sensor data, citizen movement and infrastructure interdependencies such as power and transportation to predict risks to emergency shelters.
The school
Boise State University: 10 labs on PI Pages, $58M a year on research, 64 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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