Project Overview & Working Groups

Fire is a natural disturbance agency of many forest and grassland ecosystems that contributes to species dynamics and diversity, physical structure and ecosystem function.

Fire-ecosystem relationships are altered by changing climate and earlier European fire regimes are now heavily modified by human activities to generate both biological and socio-economic problems. Intense or inappropriate fire can wreak enormous damage and following recent extreme fire years in parts of Europe, there is an urgent need for a co-ordinated of potentially conflicting approaches to European fire management.

The main objective of FIREMAN is to generate policy guidance and management tools for the appropriate use of fire to foster biodiversity in three major European ecosystems.

 

Six partners (two of which are management specialists from the private sector) from four countries will contribute to four work packages that focus on fire-biodiversity-society relationships in:

(i) boreal forests

(ii) wet upland heathlands/moorlands

(iii) Mediterranean shrub-forest systems ‘baseline’ fire regimes, prior to recent human intervention, with vegetation-fire risk modelling to generate a scientific basis for management.

Our working hypothesis is that ‘baseline’ fire regimes in the three vegetation types vary with climatic change but maximum ‘authentic’ species diversity is associated with ‘intermediate’ fire regimes.

We plan to impact management and policy in three ways. Firstly through the well-established contact networks administered by our two private sector partners. Secondly, by incorporating results into European Environmental Agency biodiversity policy documents and thirdly by joining the EU FIRE PARADOX consortium we will gain contact with the influential European stakeholder group organised in that project.

“Fire is a bad master but a good servant” runs the Finnish proverb. FIREMAN is designed to develop knowledge and tools that will help optimise an integrated European approach to fire management to enhance its role in maintaining appropriate, authentic biodiversity values.

 

Work Package 1

Aim: To establish fire-biodiversity ‘baselines’ for boreal forest, wet upland heathland/moorland andMediterranean shrub-forest systems.

 

Work Package 2

Aim: To modify and parameterise a process-based, regional-continental scale model of climate-fire-vegetation relationships to inform national/European policy and in a detailed case study develop a site-specific model of fire-biodiversity relationships to support local management

 

Work Package 3

Aim: To model future scenarios at local (Peak District, UK) and regional scales (3 cases in each of boreal, moorland and Mediterranean zones)

Work Package 4

Aim: To engage with local communities and regional policy-makers to impact planning and policy.