After a challenging start at the height of the COVID pandemic, the PyroLife project now officially ended after this second reporting period, in which our ESRs flourished and shined. Seven ESRs submitted their PhD theses and 10 moved to new positions or saw their positions being extended. PyroLife ESRs and staff involved published a wide diversity of research, often in collaboration with internal and external researchers, stakeholders and other PyroLife ESRs. A variety of spin-offs emerged from PyroLife, ranging from a new Master course on Pyrogeography and Integrated Fire Management at Wageningen University, to a working group on a diverse, equitable and inclusive future of fire research and education, and PhD and postdoc research on extreme fire behavior and the impacts of war on wildfires.
In terms of training and outreach, PyroLife organized network-wide training events on the natural human dimensions of fires, science-policy interaction and an integrative course on ways forward in integrated fire management. We are very proud of the ESR-led multi-author collaborative scientific publications that resulted from these training events: a global analysis on wildfire governance (Pandey et al. 2023) and a systematic review on the need to address suffering from wildfires to stimulate proactive adaptation measures (Newman Thacker et al. 2025). In addition to these training events, four workshops were organized, on fire management, stakeholder engagement, risk communication and changing policy. Finally, a series of knowledge dissemination activities were organized, including two international conferences, online trainings on the basics of risk communication and writing policy and management briefs, a range of webinars and other video contributions.
PyroLife is present on a series of social media channels (Youtube, Linkedin, Instagram, Twitter/X) with active involvement of ESRs. We estimate that during the project lifetime (2019-2024) PyroLife reached over 16 thousand people in the scientific community, 232 in industry, 1345 in civil society, one thousand in the public, 352 policy makers and one hundred media actors. A total of 37 peer-reviewed scientific papers have been published, with many others currently in review or in press. A recent high-profile call to action to adopt landscape fire governance was published in Nature by four staff members (beneficiaries and secondment hosts) involved in PyroLife (Stoof et al. 2025). The vision behind PyroLife and its approach has been published in the open access journal Earth’s Future as ‘Living with Fire and the need for diversity’ (Stoof and Kettridge, 2022).
