Leverhulme Wildfires Centre

Welcome to the fourth Giraffe Team Bulletin!

Approximately every two months, we share a Giraffe Team bulletin, providing you with an update on the latest from each of our six teams.  We hope you enjoy the bulletins and that it helps you keep abreast of our research. Please do get in touch if you want to find out more about anything in the bulletin (either wildfire@imperial.ac.uk or contact the researchers involved).

You can find out more about each one of the “Giraffe Teams”, including their overall aims and objectives, and specific projects, here.

Just Fire Giraffe Team

The Just Fire Group has had a busy Spring of fieldwork and paper-writing. In late March Monika Moreu-Vicente and James Millington visited northeast of Castilla-La Mancha, central Spain, where Monika will be focussing her PhD research exploring future fire regimes and integrated fire management (also supervised by Kate Schreckenberg). The study area includes Serranía de Cuenca, home to a beautiful karst landscape carpeted by forest but with a long history of traditional activities (the photos do not do it justice!). Monika and James were hosted by Francisco Seijo, the Fundación Los Maestros, and colleagues from Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha who enthusiastically welcomed them and shared their knowledge. They even ended up making the local news! The project will continue to improve our understanding of how we can ensure sustainability of the environment, livelihoods and culture in such important regions.

During April, Will Hayes was on a scoping visit to Guyana. Together with Kayla de Freitas, former Centre member and now affiliated with the University of Guyana and the South Rupununi Conservation Society, they met with Indigenous leaders of the South Rupununi District Council and the villages of Shulinab and Sawariwau. The aim of these meetings was to co-design research activities for later in the year, to go through the process of prior, informed consent, and to ensure that planned research activities align with Indigenous interests and priorities. In addition, Will visited ecological transects established in the fire-prone savanna landscape – where rangers from the South Rupununi Conservation Society walked through the meticulous data collection about to get underway. Over the next year, this long-term ecological monitoring will track how biodiversity responds and adapts to fire. The work focuses on time since fire, vegetation structure and species richness, as well as mammal and bird presence, including emblematic species like the giant anteater and savanna deer. Together with social science data, this information will help us understand how fire shapes ecosystems here, what conditions support recovery and resilience, and how biodiversity supports local livelihoods.

Group members were involved in five manuscripts submitted to the journal GEO: Geography and Environment in the last couple of weeks. The papers will ultimately compose a special section in the journal entitled, ‘Mapping human-fire interactions: challenges and innovations’. The section arises from the session we convened at the Royal Geographical Society Annual Meeting in September 2024 and brings together a collection of papers and commentaries on mapping and modelling the role of people in fire-related geographical studies. The studies included are highly diverse in their thematic and spatial scope but what they have in common is their way of showcasing the central role of spatial data, maps and models to guide the research process, to represent advances and results, and to serve as a tool for analysis and interpretation. As such, we aim to stimulate use and careful consideration of different mapping approaches in fire research and a broader discussion on the role of data, maps and models in the study of critical human-environmental issues. The papers were led by Abi Croker, James Millington, Kapil Yadav, Michel Valette and collaborator Christoph Neger, but with several other group members as co-authors and all group members contributing through discussions in group meetings. This makes the special section a real team effort and we look forward to sharing more when it is published.

Fire-Veg Giraffe Team

The Fire-vegetation interactions Giraffe Team has been working on how to model global fuel loads and decomposition. The reason the giraffe team is doing this is to better capture the amount of vegetation that is available to burn when modelling wildfire activity globally. Although litter loads and turnover rates are an essential control of wildfires, they are very poorly modelled at a global scale.

We have developed a formulation for fuel load which is based on eco-evolutionary optimality theory (EEO). EEO theory is based on the idea that on ecological and evolutionary time steps, plants will optimize based on a trade-off between increased photosynthesis and water retention. From this, we have developed a way to describe the amount of litter produced each year. This amount is defined by the amount of carbon allocated to leaves and the fraction of those leaves that fall to the ground.

We are also in the process of finalising a fuel decomposition model based on leaf chemistry and environmental conditions. This model would provide a way to account for the turnover of yearly litter, in turn improving our ability to simulate the amount of vegetation on the ground given a set of environmental conditions.

The next steps will be testing how this next prediction of fuel load will influence our current fire models. We are hoping to test this with both statistical models of burnt area and fire intensity as well as in our EEO fire model scheme. So far, the preliminary results are looking promising.

Climate Giraffe Team

The team at Imperial Hazelab have been conducting new experimental studies on smouldering combustion in peat soils, looking at how the spread of smouldering combustion is affected by the temperature gradient throughout the peat depth.  These novel lab-based studies will ultimately also improve our ability to predict and simulate peat fires through a better understanding of the factors that determine peat fire behaviour.  As the next milestone of this collaboration, Dimitra Tarasi at the Technical University of Crete along with the Imperial Hazelab team are preparing a paper utilising lab measurements to better constrain and substantially update a long-standing model of peat combustibility.

With preparations underway towards the next major IPCC report (AR7), we have also been engaging with international collaborators in the Aerosol Chemistry Model Intercomparison Project (AerChemMIP) and Fire Model Intercomparison Project (FireMIP) that will feed directly into this next report.  In particular, Matt Kasoar from Imperial’s Department of Physics has been contributing to the AerChemMIP2 draft experimental protocol which, among other objectives, will employ simulations with the latest generation of Earth System Models to better inform our understanding of fire impacts on climate and air quality, as well as future climate change feedbacks on fire activity.

In ongoing cross-centre work between the Climate and Just Fire GTs, led by Ol Perkins from KCL, and with input also from collaborators at the UK Met Office and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, we are also working towards an updated version of the INFERNO fire scheme used in the UK Earth System Model (UKESM), incorporating improved representations of human drivers of fire use, fire intensity, and vegetation mortality.

Air Quality Giraffe Team

In March, some of the team travelled to Laos and Vietnam to upgrade the air quality sensor network  along with our local collaborators. As well as fixing sensors, and upgrading power and communications, additional ‘super sites’ were installed in Laos where multiple sensors are co-located in different configurations to better understand the reliability of the data. We also installed wind instrumentation to provide some ground-truth data to help understand model discrepancies. The team were also able to collect data of emissions from cooking fires which contribute to air quality year-round.

We have also been making progress with collection of filter samples of smoke derived particulate matter. Firstly, samples have been collected for use by immunobiologists at King’s who will use the particulate matter in laboratory experiments to understand it’s impact on human cell development. Secondly, our collaborators from the National University of Laos are currently collecting particulate samples within the city of Vientiane. These will be chemically analysed by collaborators at the National Taiwan University to help understand the proportion of particulate matter that is coming from fires versus other urban sources such as traffic.

Finally, congratulations to Farrer Owsley-Brown, a Leverhulme affiliated PhD student, who passed his viva. We are pleased to say he remains in the team and is now working on an ESA funded project  (FRM4Fire) in collaboration with the National Physical Laboratory.

Fire Info Giraffe Team

In recent developments, Will Maslanka has been busy developing the FREM (Full Random Effects Model) method for high latitudes. In the process, Will has found some inconsistencies between different versions of the GFAS (Global Fire Assimilation System) product, which is a tool used by the Copernicus Atmosphere Service to estimate global fire emissions, and he’s been investigating what causes them.

Weidong Xu has used been testing his fire detection/FRP (Fire Radiative Power) retrieval algorithm using Meteosat Third Generation (MTG), a geostationary satellite, using the recent fires in Scotland as a demonstrator. Even at this relatively high latitude, MTG was able to recover a finely, nearly complete time series of FRP over the entire duration of the fires. Polar orbiters only provided a few scattered measurements over the lifetime of the fire.

Jose Gomez-Dans has been working on long term trends analysis of FRP data, as well as optimal ways to blend FRP observations from different sensors to obtain a combined, uncertainty quantified picture of fire activity and emissions from both polar and geostationary sensors.

WIR3 Giraffe Team

Since our last update, the team has recruited three Leverhulme-funded PhD students, and one SSCP-DTP funded student aligned with the Centre.

• Alex Mines (Imperial-supervised by Kountouris and Demeritt). Alex is working on characterising the limitations of insurance markets for fire in the US and exploring the impact of uninsurance on behaviour. This work contributes to the Recovery and Sustainability theme in the  WIR3 team. He recently wrote a blog article for the Centre – “LA Wildfires: Reimagining recovery and resilience”.
• Sophy Greenhalgh (Imperial – supervised by Kountouris and Rein). Sophy is assessing wildfire resilience in the UK, aiming to develop novel policy resilience frameworks. Her work contributes to the Recovery and Sustainability theme.
• Abdullah Rehman (King’s – supervised by Restuccia). Abdullah is developing models for assessing ignition and fire spread processes in the wildland-urban interface. The work contributes to the Hazard & Loss Reduction theme.

Additionally, Francesco Restuccia has been advertising for two PhD positions in fire science on his European Research Council grant. These PhD projects, to start in October,  interlink prevention and prediction of wildfire risk, by contributing to the development of a fundamental physical model to understand the process of fire spread for wildfires.

In other news, Adriana Ford and Sophy Greenhalgh served on the Earthshot Prize expert selection panel. Together with Guillermo Rein and Yiannis Kountouris, they met with Earthshot Prize representatives, including the Director of Portfolio, to discuss global wildfire challenges. During the meeting, they also explored the possibility of the Centre becoming an official nominator for the Prize. Yiannis is also Scientific Committee of the 1st Wildfire Ignition Causes International Conference that will take place in Porto in November 2025.

May 2025 (following 8th May 2025 Leadership Team Science Meeting)

Thank you to all the Giraffe Team leads for providing the updates.