About Us
We are a team of academics from the University of Exeter and University of Sheffield, UK that specialise in understanding wildfire and fire ecology. We are passionate about ecosystem health and biodiversity and the role that fire has played in shaping the evolution of plants over Earth’s long history. Wildfires occur across the globe and plants have developed a myriad of ways in which they cope with fire and in some cases even embrace it. The UK has fire prone landscapes, many of which provide critical habitat for important and rare plant and animal species. Our heathlands and moorlands particularly have been managed using fire historically, in some cases back to the Bronze age, such that plants in these landscapes have experienced both wildfire and the anthropogenic addition of fire over centuries. We care for these landscapes and want to enhance our knowledge of how to improve ecosystem health and resilience at the same time as building an understanding of the potential tolerance to fire that the plants that inhabit them have.
Our Mission
To develop an effective and sustainable management strategy for the UKs moorland and heathland ecosystems, an understanding of how the plant species present in these communities are affected by fire is needed. This is key to predicting the resilience of ecosystems to climate and anthropogenically driven changes in fire regimes as these have feedbacks on impacts on ecosystem services, biodiversity and carbon sequestration.
In well-known fire-prone in countries such as Australia, South Africa and the US, the impacts of fire and changing fire activity on plant species is well studied. However, in other ecosystems, particularly those that are less historically fire-prone like the UK but where climate change-induced increases in fire occurrence are occurring, plant species responses to fire are understudied, therefore limiting our understanding of the resilience of these ecosystems to changes in fire regime. To address this, we researched the functional traits of a large number of UK plant species (around 200 to date) in respect to their fitness to survive fire. In our research we noted the reported effect of fire on the species, the key traits that the species hosts, and their response to fire.
As land managers and organisations face new challenges in how to best look after their land and push towards government goals for biodiversity net gain and net zero carbon at the same time as providing food security, we wanted to make the information we had gathered about all these beautiful plant species available to anyone. Be they custodians or managers of land, or simply wish to understand more about the amazing adaptability of plants to their environment. This web-based simple database is the product of this drive.
_edited.jpg)