Collaboration is key

Over the last couple of weeks I spent some time in the USA, visiting the US Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula (Montana) and Fort Collins (Colorado), and attending the Natural Hazards Workshop near Boulder. Even apart from the scenery and the golf course, it was a fantastic trip and a chance to find out about the work in fire behaviour and economics going on at Firelab in Missoula, and the work going on throughout the US in the social sciences, especially related to communication, warnings and recovery after major disasters such as Hurricane Katrina (now 10 years on). It was also a chance to see how the work we’re doing at the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC stacks up.

Mark Finney (a keynote speaker at our conference in September) gave me the rundown on some ground-breaking fundamental work they are doing on fire propagation* and gave me a tour of their experimental facilities. He even arranged a demo to show me how fire fundamentally behaves like a fluid and how some of its properties can be readily demonstrated using a hot plate and dry ice – very cool (pun intended). Dave Calkin, Matt Thompson and I spent a day talking about the economics of prescribed burning and firefighting (especially aerial), and there are a  number of synergies with our economics and prescribed burning projects.

For the details of the Natural Hazards Workshop, have a look at Paula Dootson’s blog (well done Paula!) where you’ll see that we’re working on similar issues in an Australian context, and there are number of good opportunities for collaboration.

I spent a lot of time talking to US research centers that have a similar mix to the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC, such as the Natural Hazards Center at University of Colorado, the NIST funded Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning headquartered at Colorado State University, the US Department of Homeland Security’s Coastal Resilience Center of Excellence headquartered out of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and the National Academy of Science supported Increasing National Resilience to Hazards and Disasters project. And thanks to our friends across the ditch at the Natural Hazards Research Platform for making me an honorary Kiwi for a day and letting me sit in on the NZ-US research meeting.

I’m sure we’ll end up collaborating with some of these groups. We have a lot to learn from each other, and a lot we can borrow and tailor to avoid recreating the wheel.

One particular take home message from those discussions – on the difficulties that US (and other) researchers have engaging with practitioners. There was a lot of envy of the model we have here at the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC, where end users are key participants in our projects from the very start. It reinforced the importance of having integrated project teams, recognising the importance of everyone’s roles in successful applied research and working hard to keep the communication up. While we certainly don’t have it all figured out, we have a really good platform to build upon.

*Coincidentally, the research paper happened to be released while I was standing in Mark’s office!