There is an increasing interest in understanding wildfires in Britain – how they occur, and how frequently they happen. This has, in part, been driven by climate change predictions, particularly how this might alter the expression of fire where their impact is currently limited, such as in Northwest Europe. One of the largest issues in understanding the wildfire ‘weather’ of Britain is disentangling past human related landscape fire activity from natural burning and relationships to abrupt climatic shifts. This project takes a unique approach to this challenge by producing a wildfire history not only for our current interglacial (the Holocene) but for previous analogue interglacial, MIS 11 which occurred before agriculture and the widespread use of fire as an anthropogenic tool allows us to investigate how wildfire history evolves under a climate directly comparable to the Holocene but in the absence of humans. In order to fully reveal past fire regimes high-resolution charcoal quantification will be undertaken alongside geochemical analysis. The main aim of this project is to, for the first time in Britain, reveal the wildfire regimes over two full interglacial cycles and robustly disentangle the natural vs human caused fire trends.
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[Website University of Portsmouth]