Barkoski J, Liu A, Van Fleet E, Ramsey S, Miller A
DLH LLC Bethesda MD USA.
Office of the Director Department of Health and Human Services National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences National Institutes of Health Durham NC USA.
Geohealth. 2025 May 31;9(6):e2025GH001380. doi: 10.1029/2025GH001380. eCollection 2025 Jun.
With climate change contributing to an increase in frequency and severity of extreme weather events like wildfires, droughts, and hurricanes, there is a growing need for coordinated research efforts to understand the impact of these events on human health. Specialized research frameworks can help interdisciplinary teams organize and visualize complex exposure-health pathways, identify knowledge gaps, and enhance coordination and communication across diverse groups of stakeholders. This article describes the development and application of a conceptual framework for wildfire-related exposures and human health outcomes. This framework serves as a tool for integrating data resources and mapping known and hypothesized connections, between complex wildfire exposures and human health outcomes, across the lifecycle of a wildland urban interface (WUI) fire. We also demonstrate the utility and flexibility of this framework for disaster research settings through two example applications. The first demonstrates an application for studying WUI fires and respiratory health outcomes, and the second example shows how the framework can be expanded to visualize exposure and health modeling with potential biomarkers of exposure and effect. Our GeoHealth Framework for WUI Fires illustrates complex linkages between wildfire related exposures and health outcomes and highlights areas for future study. Given the destruction and complexity of WUI fires, this framework provides an important resource that can assist with evaluating these complex exposure-health relationships, guiding and coordinating data collection, and informing communities and decision-makers to improve response, recovery, and future preparedness for such events in the United States and globally.
随着气候变化导致野火、干旱和飓风等极端天气事件的频率和强度增加，对于开展协调一致的研究工作以了解这些事件对人类健康的影响的需求也日益增长。专门的研究框架可以帮助跨学科团队组织和可视化复杂的暴露-健康路径，识别知识空白，并加强不同利益相关者群体之间的协调与沟通。本文描述了一个与野火相关的暴露和人类健康结果的概念框架的开发与应用。该框架作为一种工具，用于整合数据资源，并绘制复杂的野火暴露与人类健康结果之间在城市与野地交界处（WUI）火灾生命周期内已知的和假设的联系。我们还通过两个示例应用展示了该框架在灾害研究环境中的实用性和灵活性。第一个示例展示了用于研究WUI火灾和呼吸健康结果的应用，第二个示例展示了该框架如何扩展以可视化暴露和健康建模以及潜在的暴露和效应生物标志物。我们的WUI火灾地理健康框架阐明了与野火相关的暴露和健康结果之间的复杂联系，并突出了未来研究的领域。鉴于WUI火灾的破坏性和复杂性，该框架提供了一项重要资源，可协助评估这些复杂的暴露-健康关系、指导和协调数据收集，并为美国乃至全球的社区和决策者提供信息，以改善对此类事件的应对、恢复和未来准备工作。
