Wildfire management research tailors evacuation procedures to individual communities

When tornado sirens go off, most parents wouldn’t expect their kid to be running outside to watch it blow through. But for Elena Doss, a doctoral student in natural resources, that was a pivotal part of her childhood.

“The weather channel was always on in my house,” Doss said. “That curiosity with natural hazards has stuck with me from a very young age.”

After completing her master’s degree in public policy at Oregon State University, her interests began to narrow into what is now the focus of her doctoral research at University of Idaho. Doss, alongside her advisor Travis Paveglio and other colleagues across the West, is researching wildfire management approaches, including evacuation preferences of rural Idaho communities located in wildfire-prone areas.

“I’m specifically interested in the human dimensions of wildfire management,” Doss said. “Like most natural hazards, it doesn’t acknowledge the physical boundaries we’ve created as humans.”  

For example, a fire could begin on public land, transfer over to private, and come back to public areas. This is one of the reasons why Doss is concerned with the behavioral aspect of wildfire management.

“While you can do vegetation maintenance or structural hardening, those decisions across boundaries will direct how you manage that wildfire,” Doss said. “It’s a very human-oriented process.”

She begins her research with the distribution and collection of questionnaires to gain deeper insight into residents’ behavioral responses to wildfire. Doss and her team visit the community, talk directly to homeowners about their wildfire evacuation preference, then leave them with a survey to fill out that will assist Doss in collecting quantitative data.  

“We structure the survey as a series of either yes/no or multiple-choice statements, which helps us roughly determine how an individual might respond to a wildfire,” she said. “Whether they stay and defend their land, evacuate, or wait and see, collecting this data is crucial in our collaboration with local leaders in building effective response strategies for each community.”  

After analyzing the survey responses, Doss plans to expand her research by examining the implementation and progress of Community Wildfire Defense Grants (CWDGs) in the Pacific Northwest. The CWDG is a result of the 2021 Federal Infrastructure Bill designed to prioritize and award funding to rural communities to better their response to wildfires.

“My hope is that this research will illustrate a need for more support beyond just the fiscal and physical,” she said. “Since there’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to community improvement, I want my research to provide a flow chart of information that can assist policymakers and leaders when thinking about how to increase the safety of that population.”  

As she moves into her third year, she’ll expand her research participants to include public and private actors. By incorporating all sizes and scales of wildfire-prone populations, Doss hopes to create a wildfire preparation tool that can be utilized by towns to make tailored decisions rather than a one-size-fits-all policy.

“I think gathering different types of data and different types of participants allows us to capture all points of the narrative, and my advisor Travis is one of the best to do it,” Doss said.  

Though her desire to work with Paveglio was a main factor that led her to pursue a doctorate at U of I, she recalls how she signed the paperwork before even visiting the campus.  

“I’ve been taught that when an opportunity presents itself, you jump on it,” Doss said. “U of I was one of those places that you hear about before you see it, so I knew there might be something special tucked away in the middle of Moscow, Idaho.”

Coming from larger institutions, Doss wanted a graduate experience that would not only help develop her resume, but also forge her own community and working relationships with academic and industry professionals.  

“It’s very student-focused,” Doss said. “There’s a different aspect of community and emphasis on hands-on learning at U of I that I’ve been very grateful to experience.”