Wildfire Resilience Communication: Breaking Down Barriers


Undergraduate student Joey Henschel and his Bren PhD student mentor Sloane Stephenson spent the summer engaged in building an RShiny app to convey insights and outputs from ecohydrological modeling research conducted at the UC Sedgwick Reserve. This body of work is also a component of Sloane’s dissertation research. The Regional Hydro-Ecologic Simulation System, or RHESSys, is a spatially distributed model that simulates how water, energy, carbon, and nutrients interact at the watershed level. With guidance from Sloane, Joey took outputs from RHESSys model simulations, did his own literature review to summarize key wildfire ecology topics, and combined them both into an easy-to-use RShiny app tool. Anybody, regardless of their scientific background, can use his app to learn more about wildfires, post-fire recovery, and fire preparedness in the Santa Barbara county region where the Sedgwick Reserve is located. Their goal in building this app was to help simplify the communication of scientific model outputs and the environmental justice implications of natural disasters.

Joey’s summer project went beyond just working on his app, as the work he conducted and the communication framework he developed in tandem with his summer mentor has applications in a variety of wildfire resilience community efforts. Over the course of two and a half months Joey learned how to program in R and RShiny, studied his own designed curriculum around wildfire ecology and wildfire preparedness, visited the Sedgwick Reserve to see the after-effects of the Lake Fire, and collaborated directly with other fellows also doing a project around wildfire communications in Santa Barbara. Together, Sloane and Joey’s work is essential to supporting broader research efforts at UCSB around environmental communications and wildfire resiliency.


Joey & Sloane’s Impact:

  • Prioritized independent learning on new scientific topics such as wildfire ecology, coastal California oak woodlands ecology, climate modeling, data visualization in ggplot2, and RShiny.
  • Analyzed ecohydrological model output to learn about post-fire impacts on vegetation and water recovery in coastal California foothills.
  • Developed an app in RShiny to simplify scientific concepts for public outreach and communication.
  • Built framework for communicating scientific topics to communities affected by natural disasters and anthropogenic climate change.
  • Collaborated with another fellowship pair at The 2035 Initiative to study connections between wildfire resilience and environmental justice, linked research to broader county efforts and research at the Sedgwick Reserve through joint communication initiatives.
  • Presented summer research project at the Flash-Talk event; invited to discuss summer experience as part of a panel discussion at the Mantell Symposium in Environmental Justice and Conservation Innovation.
  • Presented app and summer project findings at Poster Session Presentation at Mantell Symposium to stakeholders from the local community and research community.