Meetings

FIREMAN Stakeholders' meeting 17th-19th November 2009

Report by Dr Katherine Allen,

School of the Environment, University of Liverpool

Knowledge exchange in fire-biodiversity research group.
Members of the School of Environmental Science’s FIREMAN research group met in the Peak District in November, convening fire researchers, users and fighters from across Europe.

FIREMAN (Fire Management to Maintain Biodiversity and Mitigate Economic loss) aims to generate policy guidance and management tools for the appropriate use of fire to foster biodiversity in three major European ecosystems (UK, Sweden and Spain).

A charming (but chilly!) village hall hosted representatives from partners in the project: University of Liverpool (UofL), the University of Lund, Sweden, the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain and Moors for the Future, as well as visitors from Natural England, the University of Manchester and local ecological consultancies. Also represented were various groups with an interest in fire management issues across Europe, including the Swedish Forest Agency, Swedish Foresters SCA, the Spanish Fire Brigade and landowners from England and Spain.

The very different attitudes to fire in each of the represented countries were a major topic of discussion at the meeting and ideas and expertise were exchanged with great interest. Fire is used as a positive management tool to increase biodiversity in the UK and Sweden, whereas in Spain most attention is focussed on preventing fire at all cost.

Following the scientific meeting, the invitation was opened to gamekeepers, farmers and other land managers from the Peak District National Park, who joined the project team for food, drinks and discussion in a local pub. The audience quizzed the FIREMAN team about what the project hoped to achieve and how it could assist them in their jobs. The exchange was extremely positive, and it was reassuring for everyone involved to find that preliminary research has confirmed what land managers have thought to be true for many years.

In the future, UoL will work closely with UK stakeholders to develop practical moorland management tools, including a decision-support system. This work , along with Swedish and Spanish information, will feed into a European model of burning-biodiversity relationships in order to examine system change under different climate regimes.

 

Report also published in Precinct, University of Liverpool.