Todd Cherry
University of Wyoming, WY·Social Science
Preventing a disaster often wins less public support than responding to one. Aid sent to a burning community is visible.
- Fields
Social Science
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
wildfire
risk perception
behavioral economics
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Measure how residents of zip codes with and without a severe 2024 wildfire perceive the risk reduction from past or planned hazardous-fuels forest thinning, using a survey experiment.
- Compare how people in different wildfire exposure and forest management conditions would allocate wildfire spending between prevention and suppression.
- Assess whether recent wildfire exposure and local thinning history change people's willingness to take individual actions to reduce their own wildfire risk.
More about the research
A wildfire that never happened because a forest was thinned is invisible. This is the "Intangibility of Public Policy" dilemma: because prevention produces outcomes people cannot see, they may undervalue it, and society ends up carrying too much risk. The same problem shows up in public health, invasive species control and cybersecurity. This project uses wildfire as a test case, drawing on behavioral economics, risk perception and public policy research.
Why it matters
Communities in wildfire-prone regions, and the agencies that manage forests around them, need public support for prevention work like fuel thinning. Showing how recent fire exposure shapes people's views of prevention versus suppression could help policymakers design and communicate risk-reduction programs. The insights may also apply to other hard-to-see prevention efforts, such as public health and cybersecurity.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Mark Schuller
Northern Illinois University, IL·Social Science
Test whether disaster resilience models developed in one community can be adapted to others across different scales. Compare outcomes at multiple sites.
Sara Mitchell
University of Iowa, IA·Social Science
Build and release a global dataset of government policy responses to natural disasters for all countries from 1900 to 2020.
Nicoleta Cristea
University of Washington, WA·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure sap flux, soil moisture and snow across forest stands of different ages in western Washington to test how forest regrowth after clear-cut harvest affects summer low streamflows.
The school
University of Wyoming: 8 labs on PI Pages, $167M a year on research, 108 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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