Megan Cattau, an associate professor in Human-Environment Systems, was awarded a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program award for her work investigating the impact of wildfires on communities and wildfire governance.
Cattau — who has a diverse background that runs from ecology to painting and sculpting — joined the Human-Environment Systems faculty in 2019. The program, founded in the College of Innovation + Design in 2015 and later moved to the School of the Environment, is unique in its academic focus.
“We think about the way that the environment and people interact from a systems-level approach,” Cattau said. “So how human or social components influence the environment and vice versa across multiple levels of interaction.”
Cattau’s experience with this systems-level approach goes back to her time as a Master of Environment Management student at Duke University. She began her studies with orangutan conservation in a region of Indonesia affected by wildfire, but quickly realized the larger scope of the issue.
“[Regulations] affecting how people could use and suppress fire, what land tenure looked like… all that made me realize how much human systems influence the fire landscape,” Cattau said.
She also saw the reverse — how wildfires were affecting human health and influencing human behavior. What started as a single species conservation effort grew into a larger set of research questions that continue to inform Cattau’s thinking, including the research project supported by her CAREER award.
CAREER award supports wildfire research
Cattau’s CAREER award project features three pieces, all having to do with the relationship between wildfires and people.
The first investigates how the impact of wildfires are distributed among populations. Existing research has shown that socioeconomically advantaged people are more vulnerable to wildfire, meaning they occupy most of the area with high wildfire potential. At the same time, socioeconomically disadvantaged people have worse wildfire outcomes.
“There’s this conflict between existing national scale studies and case studies,” Cattau said. “What I’m doing is looking at the national scale to look at where wildfire has occurred, what negative wildfire impacts there were and what socio-demographic variables are related to negative wildfire impacts.”
The second piece will explore if and how community members collaborate with organizations in adaptive action like mitigation. This piece will also explore community perceptions of wildfire, using art created by community members both as data itself and as inroads to discussion. “We will have focus groups and actually do some participatory art to get a sense of wildfire impacts, positive or negative, beyond what can be captured by satellite or other large-scale geospatial data,” Cattau said.
Using art to inform scientific inquiry is rare in environmental fields, and Cattau’s interest in this approach goes back to her background as a BFA student studying sculpting and painting. “I think my interest really started way back when I was an undergrad, but I’m just now starting to develop how I can formally and robustly integrate it into my research questions.”
Finally, Cattau will conduct semi-structured interviews with wildland fire managers to explore how information about people who are affected by wildfire — including wildfire impacts and participation in collaborative action, as described above — can be incorporated into decision-making frameworks. This information exchange is intended to enhance the inclusion of affected people’s perspectives in decisions about wildfire resource allocation.
Cattau is excited to start the work supported by this CAREER award. “Big picture, I hope that this work contributes to more effective and inclusive wildland fire management by integrating understanding and knowledge about social vulnerability to wildfire from the multiple perspectives of researchers, wildland fire managers and community members.”