Research Areas
In order to meaningfully engage the realities of social-ecological-system changes, new policies and institutions must be developed to accommodate uncertainty and anticipate non-linear alterations of boundary conditions. The concept of “resilience” is increasingly invoked to examine new frontiers on how societies represented by their people, resources and infrastructure can adapt to both “changes” and truly “surprising changes.” Resilience-based thinking acknowledges nonlinear change and provides a way of thinking about how to foster the social-ecological-system components and dynamics that we value and want to protect. The UNM Resilience Institute will engage in research and educational activities to understand the social, ecological, psychological, economic, legal and scientific principles necessary to characterize, quantify, pattern and hopefully engineer our communities’ ability to adapt to surprising changes.
The proposed center will integrate four major resilience themes: Engineering, Computing, Social and Economic Sciences. Under these integrated themes, we will develop research projects that focus to investigating the following key areas of resilience:
Natural
Disasters
Power
Plants
Data
Mining
Laws
Cyber
Systems
Ground
Transport
Watershed
Restoration
Wildfires
Natural Disasters
Resilience assessment of infrastructure under earthquakes, wildfire, floods and/or hurricanes.
Power Plants
Understanding resilience of interdependent infrastructure systems (e.g. power plants, dams).
Data Mining
Data mining and smart reasoning from big and incomplete data during disasters.
Laws
Investigating disaster laws and social characteristics of resilient communities.
Cyber Systems
Improving infrastructure resilience using remote sensing and cyber-physical systems.
Transportation
Resilient transportation systems.
Watershed Restoration
Socio-ecological resilience for watershed restoration.
Wildfires
Wildfire simulation, impacts and economics in arid environments.