Final Report Summary - ECOFLAM (The Impact of Plant Evolution on Fire Behaviour in Ancient Ecosystems)
Fire is essential to life on Earth. It has played a key role in the evolutionary success of our species and has shaped the abundance of life that we see on our planet today. Wildfires interacts with carbon and nutrient cycles and regulate the concentration of oxygen in our atmosphere; in other words, fire creates feedbacks to the Earth system that keep our planet habitable. Project ECOFLAM has sought to provide novel tools that can be used to estimate and understand the impacts of fire behaviour both in Earth’s past, present a future.
The project based at The University of Exeter established a state-of-the-art experimental fire testing laboratory designed for testing the flammability of plant based fuels that carry wildfires. This was set up to be able to measure microscale characteristics of charcoals, the chemistry of leaves, the flammability of leaf material through to the larger scale flammability of leaf litter beds and beyond.
Seeing the Past: The state-of-the-art wildFIRE laboratory has allowed the ECOFLAM team to improve our understanding of how plant traits such the size and shape of leaves and their oil content influence the flammability of plants. This research suggests that these traits are likely a stronger determinant of fire behaviour than may previously have been believed. A key goal of ECOFLAM has been to determine to what extent fire has played a role in being driven by and driving evolutionary change in ecosystems. By coupling the findings from our plant flammability measurements with novel numerical modelling approaches ECOFLAM has revealed that accounting for variations in plant morphological and chemical traits in our models is essential when considering fire regimes in the past. Where we have indicated that making interpretations based solely on the abundances of fossil charcoal (as a proxy for wildfire) will lead to errors in our understanding of the ecological and biochemical impacts of fire. This means that until now we have been unable to make strong estimates of the impact of fires on the development of Earth’s ecosystems and in turn their combined influence on balancing Earth system processes, such as the regulation of climate and the abundance of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Addressing the Present: The wildFIRE Lab team has utilised this laboratory to develop a novel approach that allows less than millimetre scale physical changes in charcoals to assessed and linked to the fire behaviour that generated the charcoal. ECOFLAM has then developed this into a metric with which scientists and land managers can determine wildfire behaviour post-fire and use these to estimate likely long term ecosystem impacts from individual fires. This will in time provide us with the ability to assess ecosystem recovery following fires based on difference fire behaviours.
Protecting our Future: ECOFLAM has additionally explored the relationship between major wildfire events occurring at the interface of human settlements and predictions of fire danger, which are used to inform the public about wildfire risk and for land managers to know where best to implement fire mitigation measures. We studied how forecasted and observed fire danger varies across the USA and found that there was weaker ability to forecast fire danger 1 day in advance and that may relate to issues with forecasting of fire weather. Critically we suggest that both of such issues will clearly be exacerbated in the face of current and future developments related to ongoing climatic change. Thereby improvements may be needed to better forecast fire danger to mitigate risk to populations living at the wildland urban interface.
The project based at The University of Exeter established a state-of-the-art experimental fire testing laboratory designed for testing the flammability of plant based fuels that carry wildfires. This was set up to be able to measure microscale characteristics of charcoals, the chemistry of leaves, the flammability of leaf material through to the larger scale flammability of leaf litter beds and beyond.
Seeing the Past: The state-of-the-art wildFIRE laboratory has allowed the ECOFLAM team to improve our understanding of how plant traits such the size and shape of leaves and their oil content influence the flammability of plants. This research suggests that these traits are likely a stronger determinant of fire behaviour than may previously have been believed. A key goal of ECOFLAM has been to determine to what extent fire has played a role in being driven by and driving evolutionary change in ecosystems. By coupling the findings from our plant flammability measurements with novel numerical modelling approaches ECOFLAM has revealed that accounting for variations in plant morphological and chemical traits in our models is essential when considering fire regimes in the past. Where we have indicated that making interpretations based solely on the abundances of fossil charcoal (as a proxy for wildfire) will lead to errors in our understanding of the ecological and biochemical impacts of fire. This means that until now we have been unable to make strong estimates of the impact of fires on the development of Earth’s ecosystems and in turn their combined influence on balancing Earth system processes, such as the regulation of climate and the abundance of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Addressing the Present: The wildFIRE Lab team has utilised this laboratory to develop a novel approach that allows less than millimetre scale physical changes in charcoals to assessed and linked to the fire behaviour that generated the charcoal. ECOFLAM has then developed this into a metric with which scientists and land managers can determine wildfire behaviour post-fire and use these to estimate likely long term ecosystem impacts from individual fires. This will in time provide us with the ability to assess ecosystem recovery following fires based on difference fire behaviours.
Protecting our Future: ECOFLAM has additionally explored the relationship between major wildfire events occurring at the interface of human settlements and predictions of fire danger, which are used to inform the public about wildfire risk and for land managers to know where best to implement fire mitigation measures. We studied how forecasted and observed fire danger varies across the USA and found that there was weaker ability to forecast fire danger 1 day in advance and that may relate to issues with forecasting of fire weather. Critically we suggest that both of such issues will clearly be exacerbated in the face of current and future developments related to ongoing climatic change. Thereby improvements may be needed to better forecast fire danger to mitigate risk to populations living at the wildland urban interface.