Renschler receives Fulbright Scholar award

Chris Renschler, associate professor in the Department of Geography, College of Arts and Sciences, has received a prestigious Fulbright Scholar award to conduct research and lecture in Austria.

He will be based at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna from late November until late January and from mid-May through mid-July.

His work there will combine two of his concepts — the PEOPLES Resilience Framework and the Geospatial interface for the Water Erosion Prediction Project (GeoWEPP), a geographic information systems (GIS) software tool — to assess the impact of climate and environmental change on run-off and erosion behavior to develop more sustainable and resilient watershed management policies.

The PEOPLES Resilience Framework, originally developed collaboratively in 2010 under a grant from the National Institute for Standards and Technologies, was featured this spring as an input paper in the decennial United Nations Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction.

The process-based, hillslope- and watershed-modeling software GeoWEPP was developed as part of various projects in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and other federal, state and local agencies. It is freely available and has been downloaded and applied by hundreds of scientists, educators and practitioners around the world.

In explaining his Fulbright project, Renschler says there often are multiple land uses and land covers in managed environmental systems, like watersheds with agricultural fields and forests. “What happens when these systems undergo a ‘shock,’” such as climate change or a change from one land-use environment to another? he asks. The project aims to combine the ideas of resilience and sustainable development to better prepare for and mitigate effects of environmental change on watersheds.

The research combines short-term disaster management and long-term natural resources management into what Renschler defines as “integrated extreme events management.” This term, he says, better defines the goal “to understand and better prepare for extreme events to avoid disasters, as well as to achieve sustainable use of natural resources and development of communities.”

Renschler says the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, or BOKU, is the perfect place to conduct his research, calling the institution “basically the land-grant institution of Austria with an international leadership role.”

A specialist in using GIS, environmental modeling and natural resources management to support rapid and effective decision-making in managing natural resources and extreme events, Renschler, directs UB’s Landscape-based Environmental System Analysis and Modeling lab (LESAM). He has studied and responded to a number of disasters, helping decision-makers obtain emergency data quickly and efficiently.

Following Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and the Haiti earthquake in 2010, he and his students used aerial imagery to assess how individual structures were damaged. This project gave disaster responders a clear and rapid picture of which neighborhoods were hardest hit.

After Hurricane Irene in 2011, Renschler collected aerial imagery and topographic data of the flooded areas and led a LESAM/MCEER research team that visited communities in the Schoharie Creek watershed west of the Catskill Mountains to document flood damage.

Renschler’s work on Irene, Sandy and the Haiti quake was supported or facilitated by the Information Products Laboratory for Emergency Response (IPLER), a National Science Foundation-funded Partnership for Innovation project headed by the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and UB. Renschler is a co-principal investigator of the project, whose activities include developing technologies that can provide emergency responders with real-time damage assessments during disasters.

The Fulbright Program, America’s flagship international educational exchange program, was established in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. The Core Fulbright Scholar Program offers nearly 600 teaching, research or combination teaching/research awards in more than 125 countries.