Community resilience to wildfires: A network analysis approach utilizing human mobility data

Abstract

Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, and wildfires, have been a long-standing concern to societies at large. With growing attention being paid to sustainable and resilient communities, such concern has been brought to the forefront of resilience studies. However, the definition of disaster resilience is intricate and can vary across the diverse disciplines that study them (e.g., geography, sociology and political science), making its definition and quantification elusive. Moreover, the vast majority of studies often focus on the immediate response to an event, not the long-term recovery of the area impacted by disasters. Thus to date investigating the resilience of an area or a society over a prolonged period of time has remained largely unexplored. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel approach from a social perspective utilizing network analysis and concepts from disaster science (e.g., the resilience triangle) to quantify the long-term impacts of wildfires, especially on collective human behavior. Taking the Camp and Mendocino Complex wildfires - the most deadly and the largest complex wildfires in California to date, respectively - as case studies, we capture the features of resilience, such as robustness and vulnerability, of communities based on human mobility data from 2018 to 2020. The results show that demographic and socioeconomic characteristics alone only partially capture community resilience, however, by leveraging human mobility data and network analysis techniques, we can enhance our understanding of resilience over space and time, which can provide a new lens to study natural disasters and their long-term impacts on society.