Details of Award
NERC Reference : NE/P006477/1
Open Fellowship Application: Providing information on natural disturbance risks to forests to enhance risk management in the forest sector
Fellowship Award
- Fellow:
- Ms SA Davies, University of Edinburgh, Sch of Geosciences
- Grant held at:
- University of Edinburgh, Sch of Geosciences
- Science Area:
- Earth
- Terrestrial
- Overall Classification:
- Unknown
- ENRIs:
- Environmental Risks and Hazards
- Global Change
- Natural Resource Management
- Science Topics:
- Forestry, sylviculture
- Agricultural systems
- Carbon capture and storage
- Climate modelling
- Climate variability
- Regional climate
- Remote sensing
- Climate & Climate Change
- Data assimilation
- Land use
- Precipitation modelling
- Risk management
- Storm risk
- Uncertainty estimation
- Weather forecasting
- Windstorms
- Regional & Extreme Weather
- Bacterial diseases (plants)
- Interaction with organisms
- Fungal diseases (plants)
- Host pathogen interact.-plants
- Plant bacterial interactions
- Plant insect interactions
- Plant microbe interactions
- Plant pathology
- Plant vertebrate interactions
- Plant-herbivore interactions
- Viral diseases (plants)
- Land - Atmosphere Interactions
- Carbon sequestration
- Climate modelling
- Forest fires
- Tropical forests
- Abstract:
- The project will provide scientific evidence on the threat to forests from natural disturbances to support enhanced risk assessment by stakeholders in global forestry. These include forest managers, investors, insurers, forest carbon standards and policy makers. Better information will support the development of policy and practice to increase resilience and reduce forest losses; the creation of better insurance products to protect forest assets; and help safeguard forest investments and the commercial forest timber and carbon sectors through enhanced risk assessment. Natural disturbance risks to forest include wind, fire, drought, pest and diseases and snow. Davies has been a researcher on four previous knowledge exchange projects. The first two identified academics working in this area and established a network of over 600 contacts across the forest sector. Academic work was promoted to these contacts through a series of briefs, workshops and a website. A gap was identified in the science, for methods to quantify the risks from pest and diseases and drought for the finance audience. This led to two projects, funded under the NERC Pure Associates programme. The first created an innovative new approach to assessing the risk to UK woodlands from pest and diseases. The second further developed this approach and outputs from Forest Research's drought model for UK insurance, forest carbon and forest management purposes. The Fellowship aims to build on these projects, using existing expertise and resources gathered to date, to adapt, translate and promote academic research to this audience. The main project aims for each natural disturbance are as follows: Pest and Diseases: DEFRA, FERA, the Forestry Commission, and ConFor are interested in working with Davies to adapt her pest and disease model to assist in decisions on species selection, and assessments of the economic threat from pests and diseases. Fire: Many NERC-sponsored academics (including Wooster/Thomas (KCL); Balzter (Leicester); McMorrow (Manchester); Mitchard (Edinburgh)) and Morison/Moffat (Forest Research), are developing new techniques to derive long-term fire histories and impact analyses from remotely sensed information and fire weather/danger indices. Support would be provided through tailored workshops to develop collaborations and source funding to apply these techniques at appropriate scale and to meet the requirements of the forest audience. Wind: Forest Research's ForestGALEs model, being developed with Locatelli and Patenaude (Edinburgh), produces return intervals for winds that damage trees. It focuses on commercial conifers but new functionality supports deciduous trees. A simplified version provides regional scale wind risk forecasts and new functionality is being developed on vulnerability (i.e. the amount of a forest stand damaged). The model has particular use in assessing the wind risk facing forest projects in new locations without long-term loss records. Davies would work to promote the new functionality to an international audience and ensure it meets their information requirements. She would also support the addition of new functionality on snow risk, which requires the development of a collaboration with academics with snow expertise. Drought: NERC-sponsored academics at Edinburgh (Meir, Grace, Mencuccini, Dexter); Exeter (Rowland) and the Royal Botanic Garden (Pennington) are investigating drought. Davies would adapt their findings on the drought tolerance ranges of tree species to provide species selection advice to forest projects to reduce the risk of future losses. Their work on mortality mechanisms could provide critical information on moisture deficit and temperature thresholds required for to underpin the development of better mortality models for the sector.
- NERC Reference:
- NE/P006477/1
- Grant Stage:
- Completed
- Scheme:
- Knowledge Exchange Fellowships
- Grant Status:
- Closed
- Programme:
- KE Fellows
This fellowship award has a total value of £203,343
FDAB - Financial Details (Award breakdown by headings)
| Exception - Other Costs | DI - Staff | Exception - T&S |
|---|---|---|
| £8,842 | £162,862 | £31,640 |
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