Get to know Kerryn Little

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Kerryn talks about her research, experience as part of PyroLife ITN and future plans.

About Kerryn Little, ESR2
Kerryn is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham. She started her career in Fire and Emergency New Zealand before moving to the UK to complete a PhD with PyroLife. Kerryn is interested in understanding the interacting drivers of fuel moisture, fire weather and fire danger across spatiotemporal scales, including compounding and cascading hazards, fire-climate interactions and live fuel moisture content controls, towards improving our ability to predict extreme fire conditions. More generally, she enjoys any opportunity to get outdoors for field work.

Click here to get to know Kerryn.

Affiliation
University of Birmingham
Research focus
Kerryn’s research focuses on cross-scale interactions between drivers of fuel moisture, fire weather and wildfire danger. Her PhD spanned from understanding plot scale and landscape scale fuel moisture content variability all the way up to a pan-European assessment of extreme atmospheric blocking events as drivers of wildfire activity. She achieved this through a combination of experimental field-based studies and desktop-based modeling and statistics. Her research aims to improve our ability to forecast wildfire dangerous conditions at spatially and temporally relevant scales to meet the diverse objectives these assessments are used for.

More about Kerryn´s research here.

Post-PyroLife position
Postdoctoral  Researcher, University of Birmingham
Skills and abilities
Experimental field research design and operations | Statistical analyses and coding (R language preferred) | GIS | Wildfire behaviour field research and modeling | Citizen science
Languages
English, Japanese
Education
  • PhD. University of Birmingham. Thesis title: Multi-Scale Drivers of Wildfire Danger in Temperate Europe. Assessing wildfire danger requires a multi-scale understanding of drivers and decision-making needs.
  • MSc Geography (Distinction). University of Otago.
  • BSc Geography. Minor: Japanese Language. University of Otago.
Contact
 k.e.little@bham.ac.uk
Social media
Twitter: @littlekerryn
Research publications
Little, K., Graham, L. J., Flannigan, M., Belcher, C. M., and Kettridge, N. (2024). Landscape controls on fuel moisture variability in fire-prone heathland and peatland landscapes. Fire Ecology. 20, 14 – Factsheet with recommendations for wildfire managers available here.

Little, K., Graham, L.J., Kettridge, N. (2023). Accounting for among-sampler variability improves confidence in fuel moisture content field measurements. International Journal of Wildland Fire. 33, WF23078.

Cardíl, A., Tapia, V.M., Monedero, S., Quiñones, T., Little, K., Stoof,  C.R., Ramirez, J., and de-Miguel, S. (2023). Characterizing the Rate of Spread of Large Wildfires in Emerging Fire Environments of Northwestern Europe Using Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite Active Fire Data. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences 23, no. 1 : 361–73.

Little, K., Kingston, D.G., Cullen, N.J., and Gibson, P.B. (2019). The Role of Atmospheric Rivers for Extreme Ablation and Snowfall Events in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. Geophysical Research Letters, 46.

Other communication outputs
Conferences

  • BiFoR Trees in Time conference 2023: Wildfire danger across spatiotemporal scales [oral presentation]
  • PyroLife final conference 2023: Persistent positive anomalies in geopotential height expose Europe’s carbon stores to wildfire [oral presentation]
  • ICFBR conference 2022: landscape factors drive fuel moisture variability: implications for wildfire danger rating assessments [oral presentation]
  • IAWF fire-climate conference 2022: landscape factors drive fuel moisture variability: implications for wildfire danger rating assessments [oral presentation]
  • IAWF Canada fire conference 2022: Landscape factors drive fuel moisture variability in temperate fire prone landscapes [oral presentation]

Interviews