To kick off the New Year, Sonoma State’s School of Science and Technology was awarded a $1.1 million grant to study the effects of forest fires on forest health. The grant was from the National Science Foundation and awarded to Dr. Lisa Patrick Bentley of the Biology department at Sonoma State. This money went straight to Dr. Bentley who was the Principal Investigator for researching the project. She already has a plan on how to budget the project as well as the smaller sub-projects that come with this research funding.

According to Dr. Bentley, “The overall goal of this research is to integrate research with education in novel ways to increase scientific literacy and public engagement around the topic of wildfire while promoting inclusion, accessibility and equity.” She wants to introduce new ways of learning about wildfires such as implementing virtual reality in fourth through sixth  grade students at Loma Vista Immersion Academy in Petaluma. The VR side of teaching opens up brand new frontiers within the scientific community and gives them new ways to learn through a medium that hasn’t really been utilized as much. 

This $1.1 million shows that Sonoma State can compete at a national level for grants. The National Science Foundation is a highly competitive grant and Dr. Bentley is hopeful that this will put SSU ‘on the map’ and show that Sonoma can be recognized at the national scale. She wants to emphasize and acknowledge the 3DForests team members work that went into the proposal which was a “huge contribution of intense field work and lab work” which ultimately helped define the project and won the school the money from both the NSF and CALFIRE’s Forest Health Program.

The Dean of the School of Science and Technology, Elisabeth Wade, mentioned in an interview that “the more experience you have in the departments and the school will allow you the opportunity to receive this grant which usually means the more successful they tend to be with an NSF grant…I am very proud of Dr. Bentley for receiving and competing for this highly prestigious grant.” The grant will go on to help biology students at Sonoma State learn and document recent landscapes devastated by forest fire within a safe environment such as virtual reality or controlled environments free from the dangers imposed by areas affected by wildfire.  

Receiving this grant, Dr. Bentley became the first person at SSU to receive the money. She believes that this will hopefully open the doors for other professors to receive this grant or some similar grant which will overall help Sonoma State reach its goal of expanding and broadening field work and expand on opportunities for a more diverse group of students. 

Dr. Bentley is excited for her research into forest fire health as well as having the opportunity to mentor underrepresented minority first-year Biology students and graduate students in a virtual “field trip”. This field trip will integrate information related to climate change, local tree species, fire fuels, and land management. After going through the student program, the field trip will then be adapted for public outreach at SSU Fairfield-Osborn Preserve and the previously mentioned fourth through sixth grade students at a Spanish-immersion school. 

With public outreach, Dr. Bentley hopes to allow younger generations to learn with a new medium, VR. The virtual reality medium will allow for students and the public to address real-world issues related to wildfire via a virtual environment.