Natural hazards such as earthquakes, landslides, windstorms, wildfires, tsunamis and storm surge are all occurring with increased frequency and intensity. These events often cause significant disruptions to our built environment consisting of buildings, roads, bridges, parks, streets, and systems that provide transportation, water, power, and more, bringing to the forefront our need for solutions. In the last three years, the U.S. experienced an average of 20 billion-dollar disasters per year, up from 12.8 billion- ollar disasters per year in the 2010s and 6.7 billion-dollar disasters per year in the 2000s (NOAA).
Research in natural hazards engineering aims to develop tools and methods that will mitigate such damage in the future.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure — NHERI — is a national network of university-centered experimental facilities. NHERI facilities are dedicated to reducing damage and loss-of-life due to natural hazards such as earthquakes, landslides, windstorms, wildfires, tsunamis and storm surge. The NHERI network provides researchers in the natural hazards engineering and social science communities with state-of-the-art tools, data, and training needed to meet the research challenges of the 21st century.

NHERI’s 14-member network (see graphic below) includes eight experimental facilities, a social science component, a center for computational modeling and simulation, a RAPID reconnaissance facility, a network coordination office, and a cyberinfrastructure. Two more experimental facilities are in the planning phase.

To raise awareness and to encourage shared-use of NHERI experimental facilities the Network Coordination Office led an effort for all NHERI components to publish informational articles in the journal Frontiers in Built Environment and to create an E-book with the collection of all 15 articles.

In the spring of 2020, NHERI established its own research topic in FBE: Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) 2016-2020: Mitigating the Impact of Natural Hazards on Civil Infrastructure and Communities. The NHERI topic consists of 15 articles written by more than 100 authors. A second series of publications in 2023 focused on the transfer of technology from research undertaken at NHERI-affiliated institutions. Technology transfer took the form of regulatory changes, updates to post-disaster reconnaissance procedures to account for multiple hazardous events, approaches
to community engagement that led to earlier adoption of technology, and tools that enabled end users
to prioritize hazard mitigation efforts, to name a few.

Now, after almost a decade of operations, we examine how the NHERI network has changed the way people practice and conduct research in natural hazards engineering. From state-of-the-art, unique experimental facilities that tackle hazards from wind, waves, storm surge, and earthquakes to a real-time resource for field reconnaissance equipment, to a cyberinfrastructure that publishes and archives natural hazards data for reuse, to the coordination office that has developed an education pipeline for future natural hazards researchers, to a social sciences hub that has reshaped how post-event reconnaissance is undertaken, and to modeling and simulation tools that deliver risk analyses, the NHERI
network researchers have advanced engineering research and practice.

To this end, we are soliciting original research papers (~ 12,000 words with no more than 15 figures/tables) that highlight how the NHERI network has changed the way people practice and conduct research in natural hazards engineering. This capstone collection will emphasize the NHERI network’s impact — specific ways that NHERI researchers have advanced engineering research and practice.

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Impact

Frontiers in Built Environment

Submit your idea

Impact