December 20, 2023

Dear WIFIRE Community,

I am writing this letter during a December Santa Ana day in San Diego at the end of another year of devastating megafires around the world, including the ones in Canada and Hawaii. Every wildfire season is unprecedented, but so is the science and technology we have access to today as a basis for proactive response and mitigation approaches to wildland fire and cascading hazard challenges. It has now been over a decade since WIFIRE Lab’s first effort funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and now more than ever, our team is committed to advancing the readiness of data for advancing science and artificial intelligence (AI). We strive to enable open and transparent methods to democratize data, AI and computing services so that the scientific community can quickly develop solutions at the scale of the environmental challenges we face today. 

This year brought a number of opportunities for the WIFIRE Lab team to provide global-scale advocacy, public outreach and expertise for innovations in next-generation wildland fire science. Just to mention a few, our Director of Partnerships Melissa Floca attended the U.S. Fire Administrator’s Summit along with national fire leaders and President Biden and our Director of Product Management Shweta Purawat represented the WIFIRE Lab in a panel highlighting the use of AI to improve public safety and disaster outcomes at the Technology Summit International. In September, I was able to join two other researchers for a U.S. Congressional Briefing in Washington, DC on how NSF-funded research helps to improve modeling and management of wildland fire and smoke. In addition, I was also able to contribute to a working group on a new western wildfire resilience index funded by the Moore Foundation. We were honored to have WIFIRE Lab’s work highlighted in a CBS docuseries “On the Dot” and we enjoyed visits to our lab by K-12 students to learn about fire behavior through our immersive forest project and to play our Megafire board game.

Our team continued to build strong collaborations with our colleagues across UC San Diego and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). SDSC has been a national leader in data and knowledge systems for over two decades, linking our nation’s data collections and facilities to high performance computing ecosystems. Through such sensing and data strengths, in 2023, the WIFIRE Lab was also able to contribute to California’s all hazards intelligence during the extreme flood and snow events. Our work is one of many societally impactful activities under SDSC’s CICORE Division, including NOURISH, COVID-19 e-Decision Trees, OpenTopo, and CAIDA, who had major successes this year making all of us proud. 

Here at WIFIRE Lab, we would like to take a moment to thank you for your collaboration, partnership, and support. 2023 has been a year of great innovations, insights and impact for us, together with our community, and I hope you enjoy reading about some of our highlights. We envision many exciting activities in 2024 and look forward to sharing them with you!

Best wishes for a Happy Holiday Season to you and yours!

Dr. İlkay Altıntaş

WIFIRE Lab Founding Director

Partnerships for Impact

National Data Platform

The National Data Platform (NDP), funded by the NSF, seeks to build a federated and extensible data ecosystem to promote collaboration, innovation, and equitable use of data on top of existing cyberinfrastructure capabilities. WIFIRE Commons data will serve as one of the first Big Data use cases for the platform.

WestReGrid

WIFIRE Lab will participate in the NSF-funded U.S.-Canada Center on Climate-Resilient Western Interconnected Grid (WestReGrid), which will leverage multi-faceted partnerships across industry, academia, and government to establish an international and interdisciplinary hub that modernizes power grids to anticipate and adapt to the intensifying effects of climate-induced extreme disturbances.

ProWESS Center

Ilkay Altintas and Rod Linn co-launched the Proactive Wildfire & Environmental Sustainability Solutions (ProWESS) Center, a collaboration between Los Alamos National Lab and UC San Diego. An NSF planning grant, “FIRE-PLAN: Community Building Toward an Immersive Forest Network to Catalyze Wildland Fire Solutions and Training,” is one of the group’s first projects.

To learn more about the ProWESS Center, check out the year one impact report. 

Fire Management Projects and Initiatives

Firemap

In 2023, we expanded our work with California’s Fire Integrated Real-Time Intelligence System (FIRIS) - led by CALOES in partnership with CAL FIRE - to include all hazards data analysis for flood extent and earthquake damage assessment. FIRIS uses Firemap to predict fire spread immediately after a fire is reported in support of initial attack planning. In addition, Firemap coverage now extends to Colorado through a partnership with Intterra and new R&D funded by NASA and NOAA. Two new open fire models built by our partners in the Pyregence Consortium were also integrated into the Firemap platform to include fire simulations for extended attack periods three to five days out.

WIFIRE Data & Model Commons

We continue to collaborate with San Diego Gas and Electric to enable access to high-resolution weather and fire datasets and have expanded our collaboration to include the new Wx Map platform to provide integrated fire weather intelligence for Southern California and beyond. Our Commons based approach has inspired other specialized data hubs related to fire and environmental data. For example, our team is working to develop a new data hub for the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force, in collaboration with the Climate and Wildfire Institute with support from CAL FIRE. 

BurnPro3D

BurnPro3D, funded by the NSF Convergence Accelerator, is designed to support the planning and implementation of prescribed burns with high-resolution, 3D fuels and fire modeling. In preparation for releasing the platform for operational use, we have expanded our demonstration network through a UC Climate Action seed grant project with CAL FIRE and CARB's Prescribed Fire Monitoring Program and a Joint Fire Science Program effort with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in the Sierra Nevadas.

WIFIRE Edge

The WIFIRE Edge platform, developed in partnership with DHS, demonstrates workflows utilizing edge computing for wildfire monitoring, response and mitigation. The platform (video) integrates live ground sensor data, including ignition positions, weather data, and air quality parameters and utilizes a containerized edge service developed by the WIFIRE Lab team that runs on edge compute devices. In addition to our work with DHS, we continued to collaborate with NSF Sage AI at the Edge to develop a national scale edge computing system. 

Convergence Research Training and Education

Convergence Research (CORE) Institute

Our Convergence Research (CORE) Institute hosted its inaugural Fellows Program this year, training 95 professionals in convergence research principles to tackle climate-induced challenges. A group of 30 fellows was selected to join us on campus for an incubator to develop their ideas into research proposals and prototypes. This initiative was launched in collaboration with the principal investigators from across our NSF Convergence Accelerator cohort working on AI-driven innovation via data and model sharing.

To learn more, visit the CORE Institute website. 

Select Recent Publications

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The data conditioning team of the BurnPro3D AI sub-group continued to develop an auto-labeling framework that uses previously labeled data and fire simulation metrics to classify the safety levels associated with different prescribed fire scenarios. In addition to the development of this framework, the data conditioning team has developed a three-step process to improve wildfire perimeter predictions. 

Data Governance

This past summer, our NASA student intern created a framework that auto-evaluates the adherence of datasets and their associated metadata to FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) and CARE (collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics) data standards and principles. This work is a part of our larger effort to foster a more accessible and streamlined open science landscape. 

LiDAR & AI-Integrated Virtual Reality (VR)

We continued to conduct research at the intersection of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) scanning, virtual reality, ecological modeling, and wildfire management. Our collaborators and team members developed and presented:

• a novel scalable workflow, TrueTrees, which serves the purpose of seamlessly integrating airborne LiDAR scanning (ALS) data into fuel models

• approaches for leveraging terrestrial LiDAR scanning (TLS) data to improve biomass estimations

• synthetic forest stand and point cloud generation to advance ecological modeling techniques

• applications of TLS metrics in predicting ecological dynamics in southeastern US forest ecosystems

• techniques for visualizing and labeling TLS data to inform 3D fuel classification efforts

Select Media Features

WIFIRE Lab in Action: Reaching Communities Near and Wide

Photo courtesy of: Deborah Jordan (Subcommittee Clerk, House Committee on Homeland Security)

Shweta Purawat (above, second from left) presenting as a part of a panel on the use of AI to improve public safety and disaster outcomes at this year's Technology Summit International, hosted by the International Association of Fire Chiefs in Irving, Texas.

Photo courtesy of: Douglas Bonilla (Marketing Specialist, UCSD Office of Innovation and Commercialization)

Some of our team members (from left to right, Rukmini Ravi, Katie O'Laughlin, and Charles Erwin) at the WIFIRE Lab's booth at San Diego's Innovation Day at Petco Park, sharing our research with local communities.

Photos courtesy of: Shweta Purawat (Director of Product Management, WIFIRE Lab) and Jenny Lee (User Interface and User Experience Developer, WIFIRE Lab) 

Left/top image. Team members Ismael Perez (far left) and Shweta Purawat (far right), standing beside Chief Andrew Kennison and his team based at the Kern County Fire Department, for our WIFIRE Edge prescribed fire demonstration in Tehachapi, Kern County, California.

Right/bottom image. Team members Ismael Perez (left) and Jenny Lee (right) testing a Gateway sensor provided by our collaborators from Red Line Safety, Inc. 

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