Prescribed fire has long been used by farmers and ranchers in the Midwest as a land management tool. It helps farming and grazing by replenishing soil, increasing forage production, controlling harmful parasites, and protecting prairies from invasive overgrowth. It is also increasingly used by land managers to reduce the risk of wildfires. Despite the many benefits of prescribed fires, there are health and safety concerns for prescribed burning events, including air pollution to local communities caused by smoke, and damage of properties and injury of people resulted from escaped and uncontrollable fires. This planning grant enables research to develop an innovative community sensing, planning, & learning infrastructure to support smart and safe prescribed burning for communities that use prescribed fires for land management. The proposed research will serve communities as an informative guide and smart cyber connection for landowners to optimally plan and coordinate their prescribed fires, collect and share data, and train landowners to learn the most effective burn approaches. The research outcomes of this project will make a broader impact on grassland preservation, wildlife habitat, and environmental protection.

The proposed research will be based on a framework that comprises multiple layers: 1) a multi-scale sensing layer to collect data from three heterogeneous sources: satellite, Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS), and crowdsensing; 2) a data fusion layer to fuse hard sensor data (from UAS and satellite) with soft data (human reports and observations from crowdsensing); 3) a modeling and estimation layer for burn effectiveness and smoke impact modeling, spatiotemporal fuel mapping and estimation, and fire behavior modeling; 4) a smart and safe planning layer to support planning of prescribed burning events, and 5) a community use cases layer covering planning, training, awareness, and outreach. The research team will work collaboratively with several prescribed burning communities in Kansas--including a prescribed burning association, farmers and other landowners, firefighters-, and the the state's environmental protection agency--to develop and evaluate the proposed research and piloting approach. The project will also establish an open data repository hosting fire and other sensing data to share with the community of researchers and other stakeholders.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.