Wildland-Urban Interface Climate Action Network (WUICAN)
Communities throughout California are grappling with a range of climate-related challenges, including drought, wildfire, and severe weather events. The Wildland Urban Interface Climate Action Network (WUICAN) is a joint initiative led by UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and UC San Diego, aimed at connecting community priorities with impactful climate solutions. At UC Riverside, our WUICAN team is focused on strengthening partnerships between the university and Indigenous cultural leaders and allies. We are currently developing a 2-day workshop aimed at building conservation and restoration capacity for Indigenous communities on tribal lands. This effort is led by two of our graduate student researchers, Ariana Firebaugh-Ornelas and Miranda Buckley.
In addition to this capacity-building work, in April 2025, our WUICAN team in partnership with the USDA co-organized and hosted a day-long workshop of 35 participants to discuss the recent Los Angeles urban fires that occurred in January 2025 in the communities of the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. This workshop brought together academics from a range of disciplines, and practitioners within government agencies and nonprofit and private organizations working within southern California to collaboratively learn from the devastating fires and discuss research questions, community-engagement practices, policy options, and management needs moving forward. We compiled the notes generated from this workshop into a report that was shared with all participants as a communal resource can be utilized by academics, government land managers, and nonprofits as the work towards recovery and prevention goes on.
Recognizing the importance of cultural revitalization as central to Indigenous climate resilience, throughout this project we have participated in a range of community outreach efforts. These include tabling at Temalpakh Farms events in the Coachella Valley, giving science talks at the Native American Land Conservancy’s Learning Landscapes series, and presenting alongside the Sweet Lab at the Desert Climate Resilience Initiative meeting in the Coachella Valley.
To strengthen understanding of Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) dynamics in inland Southern California, our Principal Investigator Dr. Darrel Jenerette, in collaboration with specialists Luis Barrios and Robert Johnson, is developing new mapping approaches to characterize the extent of interactions between urban and wildland areas. One key component of this work is mapping the extent and distribution of warehouse development and their influence on habitat for rare and endangered species. This work addresses large uncertainties in WUI dynamics that were evidenced in the Los Angeles fire and the large spread of burning embers. Dr. Jenerette’s research involves Tribal communities, universities and community organizations, while the landscapes he studies range from the Coachella Valley to the Pacific Coast. He emphasizes that the diversity within the state of California and the appetite for cooperation between different institutions and communities provides an opportunity to develop new research that informs climate action. Such research is vital to addressing the climate crisis and creating a model that Tribal and non-Tribal communities might integrate into their climate action and resilience strategies.