The PyroLife Innovative Training Network is hiring 1 PhD candidate to join its efforts to understand fire, communicate risks and engage with communities, and link scientific disciplines to practice and policy.
PyroLife aims to train 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. The successful candidate will be part of 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.
The PhD topic is “Fire Resilient Landscapes in PyroLife Innovative Training Network on integrated fire management“. 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.
The application deadline is September 12th, 2021.
