Overview

Matt graduated from the University of Exeter in 2013 with first class honours in Physical Geography and subsequently completed a PhD research programme within the cross-disciplinary Earth System Science group. 

Matt's work focusses on the legacy effects of fire on the carbon cycle. Historical landscape fires influence the modern carbon budget, and present-day fires will continue to influence this budget in the coming decades, centuries and millennia. The legacy effects of fire include vegetation recovery and the long-term storage of thermally-altered carbon in combustion by-products that are stored in soils, sediments and oceans and typically referred to as "pyrogenic carbon" or "black carbon".

In his PhD thesis, which was defended in January 2019, Matt presented a collection of studies that improved understanding of the factors influencing black carbon transfer from land to ocean. Highlights from his work included:

• The identification of a significant aerosol (soot) contribution to riverine fluxes of black carbon. Aerosol deriving from fossil fuel combustion and open biomass fires was previously considered to make only trivial contributions to oceanic pools of black carbon.
• The application of statistical models to reconstruct observations of black carbon concentration in tropical rivers and to predict export fluxes at wider scales. These models advanced conceptual understanding of the environmental factors, such as hydrology, topography, soil texture and mineralogy and land use, that influence the terrestrial dynamics of black carbon and thus its residence time in the Earth system.

Following his PhD, Matt continued his research at Swansea University where he adapted a carbon cycle model to quantify the global-scale production and dynamics of pyrogenic carbon in the Earth system.