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.
Meet The Team
Prof Claire M. Belcher
Claire founded the experimental wildFIRE Lab at the University of Exeter in 2012 where it has gained an international reputation for wildfire research.
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Claire is passionate about understanding the ecology of fire and how fire has shaped the evolutionary history of plants since their appearance on Earth over 300 million years ago.
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In recent years, her research has turned to a focus on UK fire prone ecosystems, driven by the need to understand fire risk, fire behaviour and fire effects on biodiversity in these our heathlands and moorlands.
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She has been instrumental in building the UKs first fire behaviour prediction tool fireinsite.org and seeks to work with land owners, stake holders and government to ensure our heathlands and moorlands are resilient and pyro-diverse.
Dr Kimberley J. Simpson
Kimberley is a Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield whose work focuses on the dynamic interactions between plants and fire, and how these shape ecological, evolutionary, and carbon cycle processes.
She has focused much of her research on tropical savannas, some of the most fire-prone landscapes on Earth. More recently, she has turned her attention to changing fire patterns in the UK, driven by shifts in climate and land management, and what these changes mean for native plant communities.
Her research ultimately aims to understand how fire-prone ecosystems can be managed in the context of climate change to address the dual environmental challenges of climate breakdown and biodiversity loss.
Dr Sarah J. Baker
Sarah is an Earth scientist with a passion for understanding wildfires—past and present. My journey into wildfire research began with palaeo-fire studies, exploring how ancient wildfires influenced the Earth system and what the fossil fire record reveals about the drivers of fire behaviour and frequency over time.
In recent years, my focus has shifted to modern fire activity, particularly within the UK. I’m especially interested in the flammability properties of UK vegetation, both with respect to wildfire and management burns, and this has led me to become a part of the team compiling this national database of plant species and assessing their traits and responses to fire.
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Romy C. Franz Bodenham
Romy is a recent graduate from the University of Exeter, where she studied BSc. Geography including Fire Ecology and Fire Management.
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She is currently developing ecological field mapping tools to aid the collection and manage spatial biodiversity data.
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She is passionate about hazard management, biodiversity monitoring, and conservation, with a strong interest in how ecosystems respond to environmental change. She currently supports our research group focused on wildfire ecology, contributing to projects that investigate plant traits, fire resilience, and the role of fire in habitat management. She hopes to help inform strategies for conserving biodiversity and building more sustainable landscapes.​