Claire Belcher

Claire is Professor and Chair of Wildland Fire. Her research seeks to understand the impact of fires on ecosystems and the longer-term functioning of our planet. Claire is Director of the wildFIRE Lab an experimental wildFIRE Laboratory. The wildFIRE Lab teams works across the fire sciences building new understanding of the impacts of fire behaviour on ecosystems through to understanding how variations in flammability across scales influences fire adaptations and evolutionary innovations in plants and the ability of wildfires to influence feedbacks to Earth system processes. We also provide unique consultancy services across a range of fire linked fields.

Find out more about the wildFIRE Lab and our expertise here

To keep up to date with my publications it's best to check my google scholar here

Check out some of our recent products:

FireInSite A UK tailored a fire behaviour prediction system in the form of a web-based application that forecasts the probability of ignition, surface fire rate of spread, flame length and fireline intensity for a user selected location for a set of core UK fire prone vegetation types (fuels). Available free to use and aimed at Fire and Rescue Services and Land Managers. 

Plant Fire Response Database - A database that details the fire adaptive traits (traits that benefit the plant under recurrent fires) of plant species from UK heaths and mires. A valuable resource for researchers and ecosystem managers.

The wildFIRE Lab Team are currently:

Dr Rebecca Koll Marie Sklodowska Curie Research Fellow

Dr Sarah Baker Post Doctoral Research Fellow

Dr Alastair Crawford Research Technician

Zahra Mousavi PhD Student

Andy Elliott MPhil Student

Ben Phillipson MRes Student

Green Smith MRes Student

Previous wildFIRE Lab Team Members:

Dr Rayanne Vitali now at Aarhus University

Dr Teuntje Hollaar now at Utrecht University

Dr Ania Losiak now Institute of Geological Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences

Dr Rebecca Dewhirst now at Living Carbon, California

Dr Alastair Crawford moved to Durham and Bath Universities now back with wildFIRE Lab

Dr Sarah Baker moved to U. Cambridge, now back with wildFIRE Lab

Dr Nicholas Walding now at The Environment Agency (DEFRA)

Dr Stacey New now at The Met Office (UK)

Dr Mark Grosvenor now at Kings College London

Dr Victoria Hudspith 

Dr Nuria Prat-Guitart now at Pau Costa Foundation