PhD Fire Resilient Landscapes in PyroLife Innovative Training Network on integrated fire management

Do you have a genuine interest in landscape fires and resilience? And in further developing integrated fire management based on social, economic, cultural and ecological values? Are you up for an interdisciplinary challenge, looking and learning beyond your own field and assumptions? With an international team that is inclusive, collaborative, creative and open minded? Then we are looking for you!

The recent wildfire seasons are a glimpse of what to expect in the future: dangerous mega-fires in Mediterranean regions and high fire activity in temperate and boreal areas outside the typical Spring fire season. We cannot solve this challenge with the traditional mono-disciplinary approach of fire suppression: there is a critical need to change fire management from fire resistance to landscape resilience: Living with Fire. This requires a new type of diverse experts, who not only understand their own discipline and fire, but who are also able to communicate risks and engage with communities, deal with uncertainty, and link scientific disciplines as well as science and practice. The Innovative Training Network PyroLife trains the new generation of interdisciplinary experts in integrated fire management, based on four axes of diversity: cross-risk, cross-geography, intersectoral (linking science and practice) and social diversity. We are hiring 1 PhD candidate to join a team of 15 diverse PhD candidates across Southern and Northwest Europe and across a range of scientific disciplines, from social sciences and policy to environmental sciences and engineering.

PhD Topic description: Fire Resilient Landscapes
Managing landscape fire risk relies for a major part on managing fuel and vegetation patterns at smaller and larger scales. Yet fire behavior is changing and becoming more extreme, both in Mediterranean regions as well as in temperate areas. It is therefore essential to better understand how landscapes can be created that are resilient to changing fire regimes. This PhD research will focus on how the vulnerability of landscapes to fires is controlled by the features of the landscape (e.g. vegetation type and landscape homogeneity) and how that varies with the different ways in which fires can burn. It includes analysis of past fires as well as future scenarios, using GIS and remote sensing analyses and spatial fire behavior modeling. Being the last PhD project of the 15 PyroLife PhD's, this project offers the unique opportunity to build upon PyroLife research results and uses key conclusions from these projects in the creation of future landscape scenarios. As such, this project creates a basis for how fire-resilient landscapes can be designed.

PyroLife is a training program, which means that candidates undertake a set of network-wide training activities as part of a 39-ECTS personal career development plan. This candidate will be based at Wageningen University, Netherlands, with two four-month secondments in a fire service and a small enterprise in Europe. At Wageningen University, the candidate will work at the Soil Geography and Landscape Group in collaboration with the Laboratory of Geo-information and Remote Sensing .