Fire weather is projected to increase across the UK within the next century, with the frequency of days with ‘very high’ fire danger likely to double if global temperatures increase by 2oC (Perry et al., 2022). The summer of 2022 has provided a glimpse of the future potential impact on UK agricultural practices posed by wildfire, with a 500% increase in wildfires during the first 10 days of August 2022 compared to the previous year, with the majority of these fires occurring on arable farmland. An increase in wildfire frequencies not only has the potential for large scale crop loss, but will also significantly impact agricultural insurance premiums, places intense pressure on the Fire and Rescue Service, and places wider landscapes, properties and communities at risk.
We need to assess the fire danger within UK agriculture, to determine how changes in fire weather will impact the frequency, size and behaviour of wildfires, and apply this knowledge to develop sustainable agricultural solutions to mitigate the risks. The flammability of crops dependents strongly on their moisture contents. How does the moisture content vary between varieties, with different management practises, on different soils, through phenological cycles under current and future climatic conditions? This project will assess this core research question through a combination of field and green house experiments to inform an assessment of UK arable fire danger.
Through field-based experimentation, we will quantify the spatiotemporal variability in crop moisture content. Samples will be collected through a network of arable crops, grown on different soils, with different land management practises to derive the underlying controls on fuel moisture contents. Specific mechanistic controls will also be targeted based on the interests of the successful applicant. This field network will be combined with green house-based growth experiments that will support high replication of a wider diversity of fuel moisture controls, with the capabilities to assess the potential impacts of increased atmospheric CO2 concentration on fuel moisture contents within the Wolfson Advanced Glasshouses at the University of Birmingham. Through modelling-based approaches, this knowledge will be applied to assess wildfire behaviour within agricultural landscapes to consider how low intervention mitigations could have the potential to limit the scale of the future arable wildfire risk.
The research will combine a diverse array of field, laboratory, statistical and modelling approaches throughout the course of the project. The specific tools used will be developed by the successful candidates and the project team based on their own interests, but would likely include i) manual fuel moisture measurements, ii) field based meteorological and moisture logging instrumentation, iii) soil nutrient and texture analysis, iv) traditional statistical approaches, v) wildfire modelling software such as FlamMap
Continue with Facebook
