CREAFTalk with Sandy Harrison: Modelling wildfires: new approaches and remaining challenges

Extreme wildfires and burned areas, that are predicted to increase in response to climate change by mid-21st century. The models that these predictions are based on generally capture spatial patterns in fire activity but largely fail to simulate fire seasonality or inter-annual variability. In large part, this reflects poor understanding of what controls wildfire and inaccurate representation of key processes in these models. In this talk, I will discuss some recent work on the controls of fire and interactions between fire and vegetation properties, which could provide a framework for building a more robust fire-enabled vegetation model based on eco-evolutionary optimality theory. I will also outline ways in which the stochastic nature of wildfire events can be taken into account, both in understanding current wildfire regimes and for quantifying uncertainty in future projections.

Sandy P. Harrison is Professor at the University of Reading, a Distinguished Professor at Tsinghua University and Co-Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society. With a MA from Cambridge and a PhD from Lund, Sandy has worked in research institutions in Sweden, Germany, Australia and the UK. Sandy’s research focuses on the interaction of climate and the terrestrial biosphere, in the geologic past, present and future. She has extensive experience in large-scale data analysis for model development, evaluation and benchmarking, and is a world-leader in the synthesis of palaeoenvironmental data and its use in evaluation of the climate models used for future climate projections. Her current focus is on using eco-optimality theory and trait analysis to develop the next-generation of land-surface models to predict land-atmosphere exchanges and the impacts of climate change on the terrestrial biosphere.