Wildfire2026
Workshops

Claire M. Belcher (1), Henrietta Appleton (2), Zahra Mousavi (1), Rayanne Vitali (1), Kerryn Little (3), Sarah J. Baker (4), Nicholas Kettridge (3) and the IDEAL UK Fire Team

(1) wildFIRE Lab, University of Exeter, (2) Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, (3) School of Geography, University of Birmingham, (4) Centre for Wildfire Research, Swansea University

The UKs heathlands and moorlands are fire prone having typically the largest burned area of any of our landscape types. More frequent periods of extreme weather, long drought periods and changing vegetation and management requirements and approaches are altering the risk of dangerous and detrimental fires occurring in the landscape. This means we need to consider ways in which to manage these landscapes both in terms of wildfire mitigation and severity, biodiversity and carbon loss.

The approaches being put forward and rationale for requirements for management of these landscapes are varied and highly debated which is not surprising when they sit at the nexus of biodiversity, carbon and net-zero agendas alongside social, community and income needs. Despite this little has been done to test how different land management approaches and interventions might function to mitigate the spread of fire, nor where we might add different fire-linked interventions to these landscapes.

In this workshop we aim to ask participants to create their ‘ideal’ heathland/moorland landscape. We will provide participants with a base map moorland with a set of given properties and rules. Participants will then be asked to edit the landscape from their own expert perspective. This might be adding different vegetation types, altering landscape moisture, adding fire breaks, or managing vegetation height and load in different regions.

These landscapes will then be taken away and input into a fire spread model to contrast how fire might traverse the novel landscapes created. The results will be shared with all workshop participants who will then have the opportunity to feedback their thoughts on the results.

We hope that participants from a wide range of backgrounds from land managers to Fire and Rescue Services will be interested to share how they see these landscapes and what they see as useful approaches to confront challenges surround biodiversity, land use, net zero and fire risk.