Smokey Bear is mostly right — you can help prevent wildfires — but it’s not all on you.
Smokey Bear is mostly right — you can help prevent wildfires — but it’s not all on you. Using fire-resistant building materials, establishing vegetation-free “ignition zones,” and avoiding fire-related activities when it’s hot, dry, and windy are actions that, ideally, we all can take.
The scientific community, too, has a preventive role to play around natural disasters, urbanization, and climate change. Recent advances in this area, like attempts to predict fire behavior before it becomes unmanageable, are the result of an ambitious project to build a continent-wide network of intelligent sensors that monitor environmental changes.
The Sage project, of which the University of Utah is a partner institution, is a $9 million National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded initiative launched in 2019 and led by researchers at Northwestern-Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering (NAISE), a collaboration between Northwestern University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. Other Sage partners include the University of Colorado, the University of California-San Diego, Northern Illinois University, and George Mason University.
Read more at: University of Utah
