Wildfire Science & Technology Commons Opens to the Public to Unite and Accelerate Wildfire Solutions

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A team of University of California San Diego researchers has deployed a groundbreaking new platform to advance science and technology that addresses wildland fire challenges in an era of more frequent and devastating megafires.

The Wildfire Science & Technology Commons is a hub for data, models, computing resources, and expertise to enable scientists and technology innovators to collaborate with each other and work with practitioners to move theoretical ideas and experimental workflows into impactful, scalable real-world solutions. With support from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Wildfire Commons has been under development since 2024 by a team from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), part of the School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences (SCIDS) at UC San Diego. On July 31st at 10am PDT, the team will host a live online event to introduce the Wildfire Commons and present its features and capabilities in detail.

The Wildfire Commons advances firetech from research into production by connecting a community of experts and creating partnerships, data standards and innovation pathways centered around open data, cutting-edge science and AI. The Wildfire Commons is an initiative of the Proactive Wildfire & Environmental Sustainability Solutions (ProWESS) Center — a collaboration between UC San Diego’s Societal Computing and Innovation Lab (SCIL) and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

A Three-Part Commons

The Wildfire Commons consists of three main components: a Community Marketplace to discover data, models and services; an Expert Network Tool to bring together the cross-sector wildland fire community; and the FireForge Platform to facilitate development of new innovations and integrated solutions on cloud resources.

The Community Marketplace brings together diverse datasets, models and services all made accessible to the Commons community. These resources are organized with robust tagging and standardized vocabularies for discoverability, and will also include usage requirements, recognition criteria, and best practices in technical, legal, licensing and data agreements to help transition research workflows into practical applications.

The Expert Network Tool is the primary way for members to join and participate as a part of the Wildfire Commons community. Members can share their areas of expertise, discover new innovation opportunities and connect to other members with shared interests.

The FireForge Platform is the central collaborative workspace within the Wildfire Commons — a data and model discovery interface coupled to a cloud-based sandbox for designing workflows and prototyping new technologies and solutions. It provides shared Collaboration Studios for users to explore data, models and tools. FireForge is designed on SCIL’s National Data Platform to reduce bottlenecks in innovation due to slow access to data and lack of available computing power.

These three parts of the Wildfire Commons work together to advance wildland fire technology by offering structured access to resources, connecting innovators and practitioners, and facilitating collaboration through an intuitive, efficient and integrated platform.

Benefits to Members

Members of the Wildfire Commons span the wildland fire community, from academic researchers and industry technologists to frontline practitioners and members of state and federal agencies. Partnership and information sharing between fields and disciplines will better align efforts to build and employ technology that leverages the best available data and science.

All members will have access to open datasets on fire behavior, weather, vegetation, historical patterns and other factors, as well as tools and services for modeling, AI and visualization. Housed in highly curated catalogs, these resources can be thoroughly searched and filtered for use in specific applications.

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