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Broader Impacts

Overview

The FIRE-MODEL project is designed not only to advance wildfire science, but to fundamentally expand who can understand, use, and contribute to that science. Wildfire dynamics are increasingly central to ecological resilience, public safety, and climate adaptation, yet the underlying processes remain difficult to interpret even for specialists. This project addresses that gap by creating a public-facing interface to wildfire science that combines open-source tools, interactive exploration, narrative storytelling, and applied engagement.

Across audiences, the primary barrier to engagement with wildfire science is not access to data, but the ability to interpret and reason about complex, dynamic behavior. This project directly addresses that need by providing multiple entry points, interactive, narrative, instructional, and formal, into a shared scientific system.

Our broader impacts program is therefore structured as a multi-layered interface to wildfire science, in which each component provides a different mode of access to the same underlying framework:

  • Interactive interface, Fire Lab platform: hands-on exploration and scenario testing
  • Instructional interface, workshops and classrooms: guided interpretation and application
  • Narrative interface, documentary and talks: intuitive and conceptual understanding
  • Scientific interface, publications and open-source tools: formal knowledge and reproducibility

These components are tightly integrated, ensuring that insights generated in one mode, such as modeling results, are directly translated into others, such as platform visualizations, documentary content, and workshop exercises.

1. Interactive Fire Lab platform: lowering barriers to understanding

Vision

We will develop an interactive, web-based Fire Lab that allows users to explore wildfire behavior by directly manipulating environmental conditions and model assumptions. Rather than presenting static results, the platform enables users to generate and compare fire perimeters, observe how patterns emerge, and develop intuition about scaling, geometry, and mechanism.

Approach

This component will be led in partnership with Impact Media Lab, a science communication organization specializing in documentary production and educational media. Impact Media Lab will serve as a subcontractor on the project, responsible for film production, narrative development, and the creation of complementary educational materials.

The platform will be built as a lightweight interface on top of the project's scientific workflows. Because the core computational components, measurement, modeling, and comparison, are already developed within the research pipeline, the primary focus is on translation: transforming scientific outputs into intuitive, interactive visualizations.

Key features will include:

  • Interactive controls for environmental variables such as wind, fuel, and terrain
  • Toggleable model types such as interface, network, and stochastic models
  • Real-time visualization of predictive fire lines and perimeter evolution
  • Dynamic plots of key observables such as P(t), A(t), and scaling behavior
  • Guided exploration modes for non-expert users
  • Comparison tools to evaluate how different mechanisms reproduce observed fires

Audience needs and engagement

Different audiences interact with the platform at different levels of control:

  • Students and public users: guided exploration and visual intuition
  • Practitioners: scenario testing and decision-relevant exploration
  • Researchers: deeper access to model behavior and outputs

This allows users to move from observation to reasoning, building intuition about fire dynamics rather than relying on opaque predictions.

Operational impact

If predictive fire lines can be generated reliably, the platform enables:

  • Exploration of multiple plausible fire futures under changing conditions
  • Earlier and more informed decision-making such as evacuation, resource allocation, and containment strategy
  • Identification of high-risk or unstable regions in a fire system
  • Development of shared situational awareness across teams

Rather than replacing decision-making, the platform supports structured reasoning under uncertainty.

Outcomes and evaluation

We will evaluate platform impact through:

  • User engagement metrics such as visits and session duration
  • Classroom adoption and instructional use
  • Workshop participation
  • External reuse of tools and code

The platform will be fully open-source, enabling reuse, extension, and integration into other educational and research contexts.

2. Documentary film and educational media, in partnership with Impact Media Lab

Vision

We will produce a feature-length documentary and aligned educational media that communicate the scientific, conceptual, and human dimensions of wildfire. The narrative focuses on the challenge of understanding fire, the limits of current approaches, and a new framework grounded in geometry, scaling, and interface dynamics.

Partnership and roles

This component will be led in partnership with Impact Media Lab, a science communication organization specializing in documentary production and educational media. Impact Media Lab will serve as a subcontractor responsible for film production, narrative development, and curriculum-aligned lesson materials. The FIRE-MODEL team provides the scientific content, models, and visual outputs, while Impact Media Lab translates these into accessible narrative and instructional formats.

Integration principle: Impact Media Lab will work closely with the project team to translate scientific outputs into narrative and educational formats, ensuring fidelity to the underlying science while maximizing accessibility.

Approach

The documentary and associated educational media will combine:

  • Field footage of fire-affected landscapes and, where appropriate, active fire environments
  • Interviews with scientists, fire managers, and community members
  • Visualizations and animations derived directly from the Fire Lab platform and modeling outputs
  • A clear narrative arc connecting observation, mechanism, and implication

Educational materials, including lesson plans, short modules, and companion media, will be co-developed to align with the documentary and the interactive platform, enabling classroom and workshop use.

Role in the broader impacts system

The documentary serves as the primary narrative interface, establishing intuition and context. The educational media extend this into instructional use, while the platform enables hands-on exploration of the same concepts and visuals.

Distribution and reach

  • Film festival submissions and curated screenings for universities, agencies, and communities
  • Online distribution platforms and the project website
  • Integration into classroom materials and workshops

Outcomes and evaluation

  • Screenings and audience reach across events and institutions
  • Online viewership and engagement metrics
  • Adoption in courses and training programs
  • Media coverage and invited presentations

3. Open science and training ecosystem

Vision

We will create an open, reusable ecosystem of tools, data, and training materials that enable others to adopt and extend the project's methods.

Components

  • Open-source code for measurement, modeling, and comparison
  • Reproducible workflows through CubeDynamics pipelines
  • Tutorial notebooks and documentation
  • Annual workshops and training sessions

Audience needs and engagement

  • Scientists need reproducible systems for mechanism testing
  • Data scientists need reusable, scalable computational frameworks
  • Students need structured pathways to learn complex systems

Training materials will guide users through the full workflow, from data ingestion to mechanism evaluation, enabling both understanding and application.

Workshops as a bridge

Workshops will serve as a key integration point, combining:

  • Platform interaction through hands-on exploration
  • Documentary excerpts for conceptual grounding
  • Scientific methods for formal understanding

Workshops will also function as feedback mechanisms, allowing practitioners and researchers to inform model assumptions and identify gaps between scientific representation and operational needs.

Outcomes and evaluation

  • Code repository usage including stars, forks, and contributions
  • Workshop attendance and participant feedback
  • Adoption of tools in external projects
  • Citations of methods and software

Integration across components

All broader impacts activities are built on a shared computational and conceptual core. Interactive tools, narrative media, workshops, and publications are derived from the same system and reinforce one another, providing multiple entry points into a unified framework.

  • Platform, Fire Lab: central hub for exploration and source of visuals used across media
  • Documentary and lessons, Impact Media Lab: narrative and instructional translation of the same outputs
  • Workshops: guided application combining platform interaction with narrative context
  • Conferences and seminars: dissemination and feedback loops with scientific and practitioner communities
  • Publications and open source: formal, reproducible record enabling adoption and extension

This forms a continuous pipeline from discovery to translation to application to feedback, with iterative refinement of both science and communication.

Budget justification

Approximately 15 percent of the project budget is allocated to broader impacts, emphasizing high-impact communication and accessibility:

  • Documentary and educational media, through Impact Media Lab as the major allocation: filming, editing, animation, narrative development, lesson design, and distribution
  • Interactive platform as a moderate allocation: user experience design, visualization layer, integration with existing workflows, and hosting
  • Workshops and dissemination: materials, facilitation, travel support, and community engagement

This allocation reflects that the primary barrier to impact is not computation, but interpretation and communication, and invests accordingly in professional translation of scientific outputs.

Long-term impact

The FIRE-MODEL broader impacts program is designed to:

  • Expand access to advanced wildfire science
  • Improve scientific literacy around fire dynamics
  • Enable new users to engage with complex environmental systems
  • Accelerate adoption of mechanism-based approaches in research and practice

By combining open science, interactive tools, and narrative storytelling, the project creates a durable infrastructure for understanding wildfire that extends well beyond the lifetime of the grant.