Collaborative Research: Examining the Vulnerability and Recovery of Small Farms to Natural Hazards and the Impact to Rural Community Resilience

这一灾难恢复研究补助金(DRRG)项目通过为农业创造灾难恢复方面的新知识，为促进国家健康、繁荣和福利做出了贡献。尽管农业对美国和全球粮食生产至关重要，但在许多农村地区，特别是在美国中部，缺乏经济多样性和农业盛行，被认为是造成抗灾能力低的主要原因。复原力是社会经济层面和建筑环境的复杂功能；构成农业区的人口、经济和有形基础设施不同于大多数灾害和社区复原力研究的共同重点的城市和郊区。这项研究从根本上理解了农场和以农业为主的农村社区在面对严重风暴时的复原力，这将对社会和国家复原力产生广泛的好处。研究小组将确定、评估和建议增强农场复原力的行动。为了最大限度地发挥这些调查结果的影响，该小组将与扩展灾害教育网络合作，进行外联和技术转让。实施这些减灾措施可以改变农村和农业地区的抗灾能力，保护公民的生命、区域和国家经济以及全球粮食生产。这项研究的长期目标是提高农村社区对自然灾害的复原力，这需要对支持农场运营的基础设施、单个农场的恢复过程以及单个农场在区域农业经济中的相互作用进行最先进的研究。作为提高农村复原力的第一步，跨学科团队将开展一个为期三年的研究项目，仔细跟踪从危险到结构、再到农场到社区的复原力。该项目有两个主要目标。第一个目标是通过对受影响的农业社区进行纵向勘察、对受影响的农民进行调查、将灾害强度与基础设施反应相关联以及审查个别基础设施的恢复与农场一级恢复之间的联系，从根本上了解风暴过后农场的脆弱性和恢复情况。第二个目标是开发和验证一个风险知情的复原力评估框架，包括农场级复原力因素和社区级经济分析，以支持关于农场和更广泛的农业盛行的农村社区的业务连续性和基础设施投资的决策。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This Disaster Resilience Research Grant (DRRG) project contributes to the advancement of national health, prosperity and welfare by creating new knowledge on disaster recovery for the agricultural industry. Despite the criticality of agriculture to U.S. and global food production, the lack of economic diversity and prevalence of agriculture in many rural areas, particularly in the central US, is theorized to be a major contributor to low disaster resilience. Resilience is a complex function of socio-economic dimensions and the built environment; and the population, economics, and physical infrastructure that comprise agricultural regions are distinct from the urban and suburban areas that are the common focus of most disaster and community resilience studies. This research generates a fundamental understanding of the resilience of farms and agriculture-prevalent rural communities in the face of severe windstorms, which will be of broad benefit to society and to national resilience. The research team will identify, evaluate, and recommend actions to enhance resilience of farms. To maximize the impact of these findings, the team will partner with the Extension Disaster Education Network for outreach and technology transfer. Implementation of these mitigation measures can transform the disaster resilience of rural and agricultural regions, safeguarding the lives of citizens, regional and national economies, and global food production. The long-term goal of this research is to enhance the resilience of rural communities to natural hazards, which requires state-of-the-art research on the infrastructure that support farm operations, the recovery processes of individual farms, and the interaction of individual farms within the regional agricultural economy. As a first step towards enhancing rural resilience, the interdisciplinary team will conduct a three-year research project carefully tracking resilience from hazards to structures to farms to communities. The project is characterized by two primary goals. The first goal is to generate a fundamental understanding of the vulnerability and recovery of farms following windstorms through longitudinal reconnaissance of impacted agricultural communities, surveys of impacted farmers, correlation of hazard intensity with infrastructure response, and the examination of the linkages between recovery of individual infrastructure with farm-level recovery. The second goal is to develop and validate a risk-informed resilience assessment framework comprised of a farm-level resilience factors and community-level economic analyses to support decisions on business continuity and infrastructure investment for farms and the broader agriculture-prevalent rural communities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.