IDEAL UK Fire Project: Assessing the relationships between management tools of the UK landscape and their impacts for habitat resilience and wildfire mitigation

The practise of using fire as a tool to manage the landscape has been around for thousands of years. Today, a range of different land management practises exist including ‘modern’ techniques such as mechanical cutting/mowing of vegetation, scraping as well as the ancient use of controlled burns. Each of these land management practises act to reduce fuel loads and can provide fire breaks, and therefore present as useful tools that can be used to mitigate against the effects of wildfires.

Each of these land management tools are commonly practised across the UK. Here in the UK, there is an increasing threat from wildfires, that have the ability to result in the severe degradation of habitats. However, how well each of these management practises limit the impact of wildfire on UK fire prone habitats and the resulting ability of those habitats to recover following wildfire, is currently unknown. The IDEAL UK Fire - seeks to generate data to make Informed Decisions on Ecological Adaptive Land Management for mitigating UK Fire,  by assessing how human-fire use compares with different landscape management practises regarding its impact on vegetation diversity and habitats across the UK, as well as comparing these with areas that have had little/no human management interaction and have experienced wildfires. We present details on the IDEAL UK Fire project and our findings to-date, emphasizing the varying degrees of habitat resilience in fire-prone landscapes across the UK, using both ancient and modern land management tools.