Artwork developed by our Amazon Past Fire and Amazon PyroCarbon Projects, funded by UK NERC and ODA grants, was shown at a new artwork exhibit to highlight deforestation and wildfire. Tipping Point, by Bristol artist Luke Jerram, combined smoke, lights and sound to simulate forest fires. The installation ran at the University of Bristol’s Botanic […]
中国国家留学基金委和英国埃克塞特大学合作奖学金（博士生项目） Prof Ted Feldpausch is recruiting two students for the China Scholarship Council and University of Exeter PhD Scholarships. Up to 50 full-time PhD scholarships are available in collaboration with the China Scholarship Council (CSC), for September 2025/26 entry. The PhD projects focus on a range of themes related to the ecological and economical impacts of fire, drought, […]
Applications open for fully-funded PhDs starting in 2024 The University of Exeter is offering up to 15 fully funded doctoral studentships for September 2024 entry as part of our Doctoral Training Partnership with the EPSRC (Engineering, Physical Sciences Research Council). The PhD projects focus on a range of themes related to fire, land-use change, lightning […]
FAPESP Opportunity Postdoctoral Opportunity to Quantifying Soil Organic Carbon Responses to Landscape-Scale Fire in the Amazon This research aims to map and quantify the environmental factors, especially “fire”, that drive the spatial variation of soil organic carbon (SOC) and its “pyrogenic” fraction (CPi) in the Amazon. It is based on 2 objectives: O1. Modeling baseline […]
We are recruiting for a Postdoctoral Research Associate to model soil carbon and fire in tropical forests. Summary of the Role We wish to recruit a Postdoctoral Research Associate to support the work of Profs Richard Betts, Ted Feldpausch, and Kees van Groenigen at the University of Exeter and in collaboration Dr Eleanor Burke and Dr […]
中国国家留学基金委和英国埃克塞特大学合作奖学金（博士生项目） Prof Ted Feldpausch is recruiting two students for the China Scholarship Council and University of Exeter PhD Scholarships. Up to 50 full-time PhD scholarships are available in collaboration with the China Scholarship Council (CSC), for September 2024/25 entry. The PhD projects focus on a range of themes related to fire, land-use change, lightning and tree mortality, carbon […]
Tropical forests in South America lose their ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere when conditions become exceptionally hot and dry, according to new research. For a long time, tropical forests have acted as a carbon sink, taking more carbon out of the air than they release into it, a process that has moderated the impact […]
In a major collaboration involving 80 scientists from Europe and South America, our research identified the regions of the Amazon rainforest where trees are most likely to face the greatest risk from drier conditions brought about by climate change. Based on the analysis, our research predicts trees in the western and southern Amazon face the […]
As part of the NERC-funded Amazon Past Fire project, we coordinated a training session with university students in the secondary education teaching programme at the Federal Universidade de Acre, Brazil, about fire impacts, management, and sustainable forest use in Brazil.
In our recent paper, “Ancient fires enhance Amazon forest drought resistance” published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, we studied if ancient fires can alter the response of Amazonian forests to drought events.
Researchers at the University of Exeter describe some of the globally important research that they lead on tropical forests and peatlands.
This project is one of a number that are in competition for funding from the NERC Great Western Four+ Doctoral Training Partnership (GW4+ DTP). The GW4+ DTP consists of the Great Western Four alliance of the University of Bath, University of Bristol, Cardiff University and the University of Exeter plus five Research Organisation partners: British […]
In our recent paper, “Forest Fire History in Amazonia Inferred From Intensive Soil Charcoal Sampling and Radiocarbon Dating” published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, we examined the history of ancient fire in intact rainforests across Amazonia using radiocarbon dating.
A two-day hybrid workshop (both online and in-person) was held on 25th and 26th November 2021 that included 20 participants from different institutions in the United Kingdom, Australia, Colombia, Spain, and Brazil.
The four-day workshop “Science and Practices of Fire in Amazonia: past, present and future”, organized by the University of Exeter, with Brazilian institutions (Cemaden, INPE and UNEMAT), was held between 8 and 11 November – online. The workshop was attended by almost 300 people*, most of them Brazilian and about 15% of foreigners (Europe, Africa, […]
Research at the University of Exeter examines how measurements of charcoal reflectance can be used to understand fire regimes and carbon dynamics in tropical forests in South America.
In our recent work studying the impact of record heat and drought on intact African tropical rainforests there was surprising resilience to the extreme conditions during the last major 2015/2016 El Niño event. The international study, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that intact rainforests across tropical Africa continued to remove […]
The fire regime of tropical forests is changing rapidly, with implications for forest cover, carbon storage, species composition, biodiversity, function, and climate. These changes are having a range of impacts over varying spatiotemporal scales and are explored in a journal special issue on the Transformation of Tropical Forests through Fire.
Tropical forests face an uncertain future under climate change, but new research published in Science suggests they can continue to store large amounts of carbon in a warmer world if countries limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Competition among trees is an important driver of community structure and dynamics in tropical forests. Neighboring trees may impact an individual tree’s growth rate and probability of mortality, but large-scale geographic and environmental variation in these competitive effects has yet to be evaluated across the tropical forest biome.
A recent drought completely shut down the Amazon Basin’s carbon sink, by killing trees and slowing their growth, a ground-breaking study led by researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Leeds has found.
For the first time, an international research team, including Dr Ted Feldpausch, a tropical forest ecologist from the University of Exeter, has provided direct evidence of the rate at which individual trees in the Amazon Basin ‘inhale’ carbon from the atmosphere during a severe drought.