Capability – Palaeofire

Summary

The palaeofire team specialises in the analyses of past wildfire regimes at the regional to global scale. It has created a new global palaeofire database (the Reading Palaeofire Database; Harrison et al., 2022), containing over 1650 sedimentary charcoal records which is currently being used to reconstruct past changes in fire regimes, evaluate the accuracy of fire model simulations and investigate the natural and anthropogenic drivers responsible for past changes in wildfire

Who to contact

If you have general queries about our capabilities and research in this area, please get in touch with our key contact point below.

Prof. Sandy Harrison (Reading) Email: s.p.harrison@reading.ac.uk

People working in this area

Prof Sandy Harrison (lead) (Reading) – Professor in Global Palaeoclimates and Biogeochemical Cycles – read more
Daniel Gallagher (RHUL) – PhD student – long-term interactions between vegetation, fire and human impacts in Guyana
Luke Sweeney (Reading) – PhD student – impact of anthropogenic land-use changes on fire regimes during the Holocene

Completed projects:
David Kesner (Reading) – MPhil student – vegetation responses to fire during glacial and interglacial states
Dr Paul Lincoln (Reading) – PDRA – Palaeofire data and model simulations