Abstract: As the globe warms every year, climate variability in the future is expected to enhance the risk and severity of wildfires everywhere, most importantly in tropical rainforests (high confidence, as per IPCC reports), which are critical carbon sinks. Increasing temperatures have resulted in longer fire seasons, both due to reduced water retention and increased vegetation flammability (medium confidence). Through this project, we aim to investigate fire risks, i.e. sensitivity, frequency and relationship with climate across timescales – decadal to centennial to millennial – in the contiguous tropical forests of the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve (NBR), southern India, spread across protected areas of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala. We propose work on three central themes – (1) Fire sensitivity of dominant trees through measurements on bark flammability, bark thickness and wood density, (2) Relationships between tree growth, climate and fire through tree ring-based fire-scar analysis on teak trees, (3) Sedimentary fire frequency analysis to understand predictability of fire periodicity over centuries and/or millennia through: (3a) Charcoal morphometry of plant species and (3b) molecular fire biomarker measurements.
About the speaker: Dr. P. Ramya Bala is a DST-INSPIRE Faculty currently working on ‘forest fire-vegetation-human inter-relationships in the past in the tropical dry forests of southern India’. She has been recently awarded funding under the Direct-Aid Program of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Government of Australia, for activities that would contribute to ‘building resilience in southern Indian tropical forests’.