Signals for Understanding Wyoming Water and Fire Futures

Communities and land managers in Wyoming’s Wind River Basin face an increasingly volatile environment — one where the timing of snowmelt, the frequency of drought, and the behavior of wildfire are shifting in ways that challenge established planning practices. Responding effectively requires more than better scientific forecasts: it requires infrastructure for translating those forecasts into decisions, and for ensuring that the knowledge informing those decisions reflects both scientific evidence and the Indigenous knowledge and other local knowledge held by communities in the basin.

This project is building that infrastructure, starting with the foundational work that makes long-term community-based planning possible. The immediate focus is threefold: synthesizing the scientific literature on signals frameworks as applied to water and fire hazards; building the coalitions and relationships — across research institutions, land management agencies, and Indigenous communities — that any durable planning body will require; and developing the theoretical grounding for signals committees in the Wyoming context, drawing on emerging frameworks that integrate scientific monitoring with traditional ecological knowledge and community expertise.

“Signals” in this context refer to specific, observable conditions or events that indicate a system is approaching a threshold — and that should trigger a pre-determined mitigation or adaptation response. Signals committees are the deliberative bodies that identify, monitor, and act on those signals, designed to be sustained over time and embedded in the communities they serve. The Wind River Basin, with its complex web of water rights, Indigenous land stewardship, and fire-adapted landscapes, is both a compelling and a challenging context in which to develop this approach.

The aspiration, beyond this initial phase, is a scenario planning process and a functioning signals committee infrastructure that can serve as a model for other Wyoming watersheds and beyond — giving communities tools for anticipating and navigating environmental futures rather than simply responding to them after the fact.