IDEAL UK FIRE: Toward Informed Decisions on Ecologically Adaptive Land management for mitigating UK FIRE
MEET THE TEAM
University of Birmingham
Prof. Nicholas Kettridge
Is an ecohydrologist specialising in ecosystem resilience to disturbance, specifically wildfire. He has had associated research projects of ~£12M with £2.5M in direct research income, and 65 influential publications in high impact international research journals including Nature Comm and PNAS. He is adjunct Professor at the School of Bioscience, University of Alberta and Associate Editor of the journal Ecosystems. NK is an experienced project manager in research and wider university administration, leading the EPA project Irish Peatland Resilience, work package lead and education coordinator of Pyrolife and Deputy Head of a School of 100 faculty staff.
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Tara Jeffery
Tara is a Research technician for the biodiversity portion of the project, she has project managed the applications for site permissions and the biodiversity data collection across the field sites for WP1. She holds a masters degree in Global Biodiversity Conservation and honours degrees in Contemporary Crafts and Horticulture, with over 10 years of work with plants spanning both the public and private sectors.
Dr Joseph Wayman
Is a macroecologist focused on the impact of anthropogenic activity on biodiversity across time and space. Joe Wayman studied Zoology at Bangor University before moving to the University of Birmingham for his PhD in Physical Geography, looking at changes in biodiversity through time and space. From 2021 – 2023 he also worked as a research associate on the project MEFA which aimed to use staring radar technology to track and monitor bird activity above the city of Birmingham. In 2023 he completed his PhD and started work on the IDEAL project under Nick Kettridge and Laura Graham, researching questions around moorland management within the UK and the impacts on biodiversity and wildfire risk. His work on the project involves simulating landscapes with varying levels of management intensity and then investigating the potential impact on different species groups.
Dr Kerryn Little
Kerryn is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham. She started her fire career as a rural volunteer with Fire and Emergency New Zealand before moving to the UK to complete a PhD in Geography as part of the European ITN ‘PyroLife' and a Postdoc with the NERC highlight project UKFDRS 'toward a UK fire danger rating system'. Kerryn has also been a member of the Board of Directors for the International Association of Wildland Fire since 2025. Kerryn's research focuses on understanding the interacting controls on wildfire danger across spatiotemporal scales, from large-scale atmospheric circulation drivers to vegetation responses that govern live fuel moisture and flammability. Her aim is to improve our ability to forecast wildfire danger, especially in emerging fire prone regions like the UK that lack operational tools to support decision making. Kerryn supports the management of the IDEAL project.
Andy Elliott
Has been a Station Commander with Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service since 1983, specialising in wildfire and is currently a wildfire consultant and wildland fire trainer. As part of this role, he has with the Forestry Commission developed the first series of LANTRA-accred ited training courses in fire management. He has been involved in wildfire research in the UK, Europe and South Africa, specialising in conducting fuel reduction and experimental burns.
University of Exeter
Prof. Claire Belcher
Claire founded the experimental wildFIRE Lab at the University of Exeter in 2012 where it has gained an international reputation for wildfire research.
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Claire is passionate about understanding the ecology of fire and how fire has shaped the evolutionary history of plants since their appearance on Earth over 300 million years ago.
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In recent years, her research has turned to a focus on UK fire prone ecosystems, driven by the need to understand fire risk, fire behaviour and fire effects on biodiversity in these our heathlands and moorlands.
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She has been instrumental in building the UKs first fire behaviour prediction tool fireinsite.org and seeks to work with land owners, stake holders and government to ensure our heathlands and moorlands are resilient and pyro-diverse.
Prof. Kevin J. Gaston
Is an ecologist focussing heavily on the interactions between people and biodiversity. His research addresses both the impacts of people on biodiversity (through an array of pressures), and the impacts of biodiversity on people (including for their health and wellbeing), with particular interest in the direct sensory interactions that people have with nature. He has published extensively on these and related topics, and has been a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher since 2004. He has had support for his research from a broad range of funders, including DEFRA, EPSRC, ERC and NERC. Kevin was founding director of the Environment & Sustainability Institute at the University of Exeter, and is founding editor-in-chief of the British Ecological Society journal People and Nature.
Dr Sarah Chadburn
is a NERC independent research fellow focusing on modelling the car bon cycle. She has worked extensively with the JULES model including developing methane dynam ics and a new peatland scheme, as well as leading the Soil Biogeochemistry module in the JULES science committee. She also leads a work package in MOTHERSHIP, a NERC large grant modelling temperate peatland dynamics including drainage and restoration. Dr Chadburn has a track record of high-impact science, e.g. in Nat. Clim. Change.
Romy C. Franz Bodenham
Romy is a recent graduate from the University of Exeter, where she studied BSc. Geography including Fire Ecology and Fire Management.
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She is currently developing ecological field mapping tools to aid the collection and manage spatial biodiversity data.
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She is passionate about hazard management, biodiversity monitoring, and conservation, with a strong interest in how ecosystems respond to environmental change. She currently supports our research group focused on wildfire ecology, contributing to projects that investigate plant traits, fire resilience, and the role of fire in habitat management. She hopes to help inform strategies for conserving biodiversity and building more sustainable landscapes.​
Dr Rayanne Vitali
Rayanne Vitali is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Exeter working on the interactions between vegetation, fire, and carbon dynamics across different spatial and temporal scales. Her work uses a range of modelling approaches to understand how fire, vegetation, and carbon dynamics shape one another through feedbacks within the Earth system, from deep-time questions such as fire’s role in regulating atmospheric oxygen, to modern high-latitude fire regimes and their impacts on carbon storage under climate change. Whilst primarily based in modelling, she has also taken part in UK-based fire field campaigns, occasionally stepping out from behind the computer to engage directly with fire-affected landscapes.
Zahra Mousavi
Zahra has a background in engineering, with experience in remote sensing and GIS, and a strong interest in applying data-driven approaches to environmental challenges. Her work focuses on wildfire modelling, with particular emphasis on how landscape management strategies influence fire behaviour and fire risk.
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Since beginning her PhD, she has been developing and applying spatial data analysis, AI-based methods, and computational modelling tools to better understand fire dynamics and evaluate potential land-management mitigation strategies. Her research aims to support more informed decision-making by identifying practical approaches to vegetation management and landscape-scale fire risk reduction.
Zahra is particularly interested in developing robust, evidence-based methods that can be translated into real-world applications. This includes the use of geospatial technologies and simulation frameworks to assess how different management interventions perform under varying environmental conditions.
Looking ahead, she aims to continue building expertise in wildfire modelling and landscape management and to contribute to applied solutions through collaboration with researchers, land managers, and practitioners. Her broader goal is to support the development of effective, data-informed strategies for reducing wildfire risk and improving landscape resilience.
Dr Alastair Crawford
Alastair is an environmental scientist specialising in fire, who first joined the University of Exeter's wildFIRE lab as a postgraduate student in 2012. After completing a PhD on methods used to interpret the fossil record of wildfire, he later returned as a postdoctoral researcher, studying the application of charcoal analyses to determine fire severity, and working on calorimetric analysis of peat flammability. He worked as Research Technician on the project 'Toward a UK fire danger rating system', studying vegetation flammability and developing fuel models for fire behaviour prediction. For IDEAL UK Fire he has provided field- and lab-based technical support, including the assessment of pyrogenic soil carbon.
University of York
Dr Andreas Heinemeyer
Dr Andreas Heinemeyer is an Associate Professor (senior researcher) at the Stockholm Environment Institute with an H-index of 37 (>45 publications) and over 20 years experience in the field of terrestrial carbon cycling, notably in peatlands and plant-soil flux separation. He is leading the long-term Defra-initiated Peatland-ES-UK study (so far 15 years; £2.8M) assessing plot-to-catchment scale management impacts (i.e., comparing fire vs cutting or no management) on ecosystem services in heather-dominated upland peatlands. He is a contributor to the Peatland Code emission factor updates and is providing information to various members and departments of the UK government.
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Anthony Jones
Anthony is a Research Technician for Work Package 2 of the IDEALFIRE project, led by Andreas Heinemeyer. He brings a decade of technical experience from the Peatland-ES-UK project, where he has studied the impacts of vegetation management on biodiversity, carbon dynamics, and water quality in UK upland peatlands. Anthony’s experience covers field-based GHG flux measurements (carbon and methane), vegetation surveys, and insect counts to the laboratory analysis of water and peat samples for water quality and carbon content. He holds an MSc in Wetland Science and Conservation from Bangor University and a BSc in Applied Biology from the University of Nottingham.
Dr Tom Holmes
Tom is a research technician at the Stockholm Environment Institute in York. Tom’s work links plant and soil carbon dynamics to land management and climate change. Alongside Anthony and Andreas, he coordinates UK-wide peatland and heathland carbon-flux monitoring and carbon balance modelling for work package two of IDEAL UK FIRE. Tom also works across the Yorkshire Dales and Forest of Bowland for Peatland-ES-UK; a long-term monitoring project led by Andreas, which assesses the impacts of vegetation management on biodiversity, water quality and carbon dynamics in heather-dominated upland peatlands.
Swansea University
Prof. Stefan Doerr
Is a Professor of Wildland Fire Science at Swansea University (UK), Director of its Centre for Wildfire Research and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Wildland Fire. He has investigated wildfires for over three decades across all fire-affected continents and has held collaborative research positions in Australia, Spain, and the USA. His work focuses on wildfire impacts and their mitigation, as well as global fire patterns, the role of climate change, trends and social perceptions of fire. He is a member of OECD’s Task Force on Climate Change Adaptation and works closely with academics, natural resources managers, firefighters and industry partners in the UK and overseas. He frequently engages with TV, printed and online news both in the UK and internationally, and acts as a fact checker for Climatefeedback.org, a global coalition of scientists working to improve the accuracy of climate media coverage. He is recipient of the Royal Geographical Society’s 2024 Murchison Award for his for pioneering research, influencing policy, and management of environmental risks from wildfires.
Dr Sarah J. Baker
Sarah is an Earth scientist with a passion for understanding wildfires—past and present. Her journey into wildfire research began with palaeo-fire studies, exploring how ancient wildfires influenced the Earth system and what the fossil fire record reveals about the drivers of fire behaviour and frequency over time.
In recent years, her focus has shifted to modern fire activity, particularly within the UK. She is especially interested in the flammability properties of UK vegetation and the impacts of wildfires and their associated carbon emissions.
Technical Assistants
Technician Maria Santiso also provides high quality technical support throughout the project, with extensive expertise in the monitoring of ecosystem carbon fluxes and laboratory measurements of plant C, soil C, pyrogenic C and elemental contents.