Editor’s note: Meet all five winners of our 2024 Women In Science Incentive Prize here.
Danielle Touma is no stranger to drought. The research professor at University of Texas, Austin, was born in Lebanon and grew up in the drought-prone Middle East. Touma’s childhood shaped her career.
“When I did my civil engineering undergrad I focused on water resources, and a lot of the things we talked about in class reminded me of the conditions we had growing up,” she says. “So it all came together later on in my life.”
Touma, who has a PhD in earth system sciences, has spent her career working to understand how extreme climate events have changed in a warming world. She uses model simulations and statistics to understand the changes in the frequency, duration and geographic areas of wildfires, droughts and heavy rain. But she’s recently taken a different turn and stepped out from the research lab and into the field – into Karuk territory, a tribe in Northern California, to be exact.
Touma was doing her postdoc at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, modeling wildfire risk, when she was approached by a University of Washington academic to help with a joint NCAR project. “This person has really deep ties to the Karuk tribe and was developing a hydrology model for the tribe. They wanted to understand more about wildfire risk in the territory and they knew I was working on that already, so they brought me into it.”
She visited the tribe last June, and it “cemented” her goal of helping the tribe understand the wildfire risks they faced. “I realized I wanted to continue working with them. They want to understand what these risks mean for their cultural practices and their livelihoods.”
Climate change has been proven to impact the food sources of tribes across the U.S., affecting the supply and quality of traditional foods. Tribal nations are disproportionately impacted by climate change – including extreme weather events, biodiversity loss and threats to traditional livelihoods. Tribes have been stewards of the Earth for centuries, possessing an in-depth knowledge of the land and ocean, but climate change is making weather increasingly unpredictable. The number of large fires – ones that damage 10,000 acres or more – has increased in California in the past two decades, with 10 of the largest fires burning in 2020 and 2021.
Touma’s aim is to help the Karuks prepare for the climate challenges they’re facing. “They know the minute details of how their land works,” she says,” and how everything comes together – hydrologically, ecologically, culturally. They know what’s good for their land.” Tribes are better at managing the land because they simply have more experience doing so.
She plans to develop a climate projection framework that integrates tribal climate and land observations with Earth system model simulations – essentially combining modern science with traditional ecological knowledge. The result will empower the tribe to quantify future wildfire, drought and extreme rainfall risks in Karuk territory, and enable them to assess best methods for dealing with the risk – such as carrying out prescribed burning to limit wildfires. “That will be new for me,” adds Touma, “translating what I know about extremes from these global climate models and regional climate models to how they can be used on the ground.”
Touma says she’s excited to work with the tribe, and hopes the partnership will create a blueprint for other scientists to work with Indigenous populations.
“Co-creating research with scientists and tribal communities is really what we need to be doing to address extreme weather risks.” ◼️
