Maria Watson
University of Florida, FL·Social Science
Severe windstorms can wreck barns, equipment and other farm buildings. When that happens, the damage reaches beyond individual families to whole rural economies.
- Fields
Social Science
Engineering
Plant Science & Agriculture
- Topics
disaster resilience
natural hazards
windstorms
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Oct 2026
What they work on
- Track how farms recover from severe windstorms over time, using repeated field visits to affected agricultural communities and surveys of farmers whose operations were damaged.
- Relate windstorm intensity to damage in farm infrastructure, and link the recovery of individual structures to the recovery of whole farm operations.
- Develop and validate a risk-informed resilience framework that combines farm-level resilience factors with community economic analyses, to guide infrastructure investment and business continuity decisions in agriculture-dependent rural areas.
More about the research
Many rural areas, especially in the central U.S., depend heavily on agriculture and have little economic variety. This dependence is thought to make them less resilient to disasters. Most disaster research focuses on cities and suburbs. Farm regions, however, have different populations, economies and buildings. This project asks how farms and farm-dependent communities hold up and recover after windstorms.
Why it matters
The findings could help farmers, rural communities and planners in agricultural regions, particularly in the central U.S. They could show which steps reduce windstorm damage and speed recovery, and they could guide decisions about infrastructure investment and business continuity. Through the Extension Disaster Education Network, recommended actions could reach farmers directly. This could help protect rural livelihoods, regional economies and food production.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Katherine Nelson
University of Missouri-Columbia, MO·Plant Science & Agriculture·Early-career
Identify and describe crop "simplification traps" in U.S. farm regions by applying change-point analysis, which detects when trends shift, to agricultural census and archival data.
Julio Ramirez
Purdue University, IN·Engineering
Convene and support NHERI network governance, including the Council, Network Independent Advisory Committee and User Forum, and update the NHERI Science Plan that sets shared research priorities across earthquake, wind and coastal hazards.
Brittany Brand
Boise State University, ID·Social Science
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.
The school
University of Florida: 65 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 795 research doctorates a year.
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