Who gets included in designing resilience?
Research and flood solutions go beyond the lab. By involving community leaders, local government agencies and even high school students, the University of Georgia’s Compound Inundation Team for Resilient Applications (CITRA) is rethinking how flood mitigation systems are designed.
An interdisciplinary effort in San Juan, Puerto Rico is focused on helping residents build resilience to compound flooding driven by heavy rainfall, storm surge and rising sea levels. Rather than relying solely on traditional engineering approaches, the team is building a community-centered model that incorporates local knowledge at every phase of planning and design.
“We want to learn how we can design flood mitigation solutions–culverts, rain gardens, stormwater systems, seawalls–in a way that includes local knowledge from the very beginning,” said Félix Santiago-Collazo, UGA project lead and College of Engineering assistant professor. “Not just at the end, as we tend to do as engineers.”
The NSF-funded initiative brings together residents from three communities surrounding the San Juan Bay Estuary: Juana Matos to the west, Puerto Nuevo in the Río Piedras watershed, and the Martín Peña channel communities to the east. Community leaders from each area are working alongside representatives from NOAA, USGS, the US Army Corps of Engineers, emergency management offices, universities and nonprofit organizations.
The collaborative approach reflects a growing movement towards participatory climate adaptation in Puerto Rico and other flood-prone regions.
One of the project’s central activities has been a series of biannual meetings, including flood mapping workshops. During these sessions, residents and leaders gathered around maps of their neighborhoods and identified areas that flood frequently, how water moves through streets and where flood sensors could be installed for the biggest impact.
Researchers say the workshops provide insights that can’t be captured through models alone.
The sensor network, which uses low-cost tech to monitor water levels, will eventually support a real-time flood monitoring and warning system designed for local communities. Instead of broad warnings about flooding based on the rainfall potential, the project aims to deliver street-level flood forecasts that help people better prepare for real-life impacts.
“Right now, warnings might say an entire community could receive three inches of rain and to prepare for flooding,” said Santiago-Collazo. “We can say, with three inches of rainfall, the area from this street to that street is going to be flooded from this time to that time. Avoid this route.”
The team hopes the effort will lead to one of the first impact-based flood forecasting systems in the Caribbean, supporting the United Nations goal of better early warning systems for everyone.
Adopt-a-Sensor
Resilience is for everyone. Going beyond community workshops, the project also invites high school students from Cataño to lead.
Teachers in the community are integrating flood monitoring into classroom activities, allowing students to learn programming, electrical systems, cloud computing and environmental data management through hands-on participation.
At a workshop held in May of 2026, researchers teamed up with Francisco Oller High School students to build five sensors, with plans to recreate the meeting at additional communities in August. School groups will continue to help build and install sensors as the researchers invite them to “adopt” individual devices as teams.
“It’s so cool and unique, that we’re lucky enough to have found a partner on this side,” said Santiago-Collazo. “Students are already discussing what to name their sensors, designing flyers for community outreach and incorporating the work into science fair projects.”
The project uses FloodNet technology, a system developed by researchers at the City University of New York, and a sensor type that the CITRA crew has already worked with here in Athens and abroad in São Paulo, Brazil. Computer scientists manage cloud-based systems of flood data to process and display real-time sensor data online.
In addition to technical research, social scientists on the team, like UGA anthropologist Don Nelson, are examining how this process of including residents in engineering design and emergency risk management develops.
Eventually, project leaders hope the sensor network and public information platform will remain community-managed for long after the research phase ends. Real-time flood data will be displayed online, and residents may be able to enroll in text alert systems that notify them when nearby sensors detect rising water levels.
“The goal is not just to install sensors,” said Santiago-Collazo. “It’s to build relationships and systems that help communities understand what’s happening and prepare for future flooding together.”
As flooding frequency and intensity increases across Puerto Rico, this project offers a model for how engineering, education and community knowledge can work together to support applied solutions.