Participant ID: 16 - University of Leicester (ULEICS)
	http://www.le.ac.uk/geography/

Expertise and experience The University of Leicester is one of the UK's leading research and teaching universities. The University has 18,005 students including 8,514 at postgraduate level. There are 34 academic departments located in five faculties: Arts, Law, Medicine and Biological Sciences, Science and Social Sciences. The University employs approximately 3,500 staff. The University had 25 ratings of 5*, 5 or 4 in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise when 84% of the staff were in units of assessment of national and international excellence. In the National Student Survey 2006, organised by the funding councils, the University was ranked 1st for teaching quality, academic support, personal development and overall satisfaction amongst universities teaching full-time students. Its student completion rate is in the top 10 nationally. Leicester is home to two Centres of Excellence in Teaching and Learning and plays an important part in a third. The Department of Geography carries out interdisciplinary research into the nature and dynamics of human-environmental systems, and houses the Human Geography group, the GIS group and the Physical Geography group. Physical Geography at Leicester is recognised for its high-quality research, which is interdisciplinary in nature and international in scope. Staff within the Department are renowned for their contribution to the development of research understanding in environmental science and their scholarship defines and shapes contemporary research and policy agendas. Research in Physical Geography is currently organised around four themes (see below) and is funded from numerous organisations including NERC, ESRC, European Commission, DEFRA, RELU, NSF, European Space Agency, DMCII, British Academy, Leverhulme, Libyan Society and the Netherlands Science Foundation. Work being carried out by members of the Biogeochemical and Biophysical Processes Research Group focuses on increasing our understanding of the interactions between ecological, biophysical and anthropogenic processes, in particular the response of vegetation to past and present climate variability and to future climate change scenarios; biogeochemical cycling in ecosystems; dynamics of sediment transfers by fluvial activity; the environmental impacts of human activities and the effects of biological processes on geochemical sediments. Members of the Environmental Reconstruction Research Group seek to understand the characteristics of past environments, processes of environmental change and the implications of future environmental change and carry out research on Quaternary environmental changes in dryland environments, reconstructing long-term climatic and environmental change in southern Africa, palaeoenvironmental reconstruction and other themes. Research by the Nature, Environment and Society Group develops a better understanding of the relationships between social constructions of nature and the natural environment during the last millennium, and investigates issues including the politics and physical processes of climate change, natural resource management in the humid tropics and eco-activism. The Modelling and Visualization of Geographical Information Group develops innovative methods for the production, modelling and visualization of geographical information. Interests include algorithms that exploit growing volumes of geographical spatial data including satellite data, uncertainty modelling, new approaches to mapping and interrogating spatial data, the modelling of terrestrial ecosystem fluxes and spatial statistical techniques, bioclimatic & climatic modelling, ecological mapping, mapping and monitoring of vegetation fires. Role in this project WP4: (i) Development of an improved and validated algorithm to estimate carbon emission from fires combining burned area (CEH) and fire radiative energy (KCL) approaches; (ii) Derivation of remote sensing datasets of fire variability and an analysis of influencing factors, including climatic oscillations (e.g.. El Nino), population density, land cover type and meteorology; (iii) Investigate the coupling of interannual climate variability, population density, land cover type and fire frequency / intensity using a remote sensing data analysis approach. Principal Investigator and collaborators Heiko Balzter, Prof., Principal Investigator, is Head of Physical Geography at the University of Leicester, UK, commencing in September 2006. Previously he acted as Head of the Section for Earth Observation at CEH Monks Wood from 2003-2006. He is a member of the Senior Management Committee of the NERC Climate and Land Surface Systems Interaction Centre (CLASSIC). He has 8 years research experience in optical and radar remote sensing. Prof. Balzter is on the IGBP UK National Committee, the NERC Peer Review College, is a co-investigator on several NERC and EU funded research projects, a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and member of the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society (RSPSoc). Recent research in the EU project "Multi-sensor concepts for greenhouse gas accounting in Northern Eurasia" (SIBERIA-II) has investigated the coupling between the Arctic Oscillation and interannual Siberian fire variability, and the use of burned area mapping techniques in full greenhouse gas accounting schemes. In the GEOLAND project (Global land cover and forest change observatory) Prof. Balzter is leading the development of environmental assessment methods for boreal Eurasia. In the NERC project CORSAR he is developing SAR techniques for improved carbon accounting. Prof. Balzter has published over 100 papers (14 peer reviewed journal papers). Kevin Tansey, Dr., is an expert in remote sensing of land cover, with over 10 years of experience. He has particular expertise in the remote sensing of burnt areas at the global scale. He was responsible for the development of the GBA2000 product between 2001 and 2003. Whilst at the University of Leicester, UK he developed a global, daily burnted area product and has a contract from the Joint Research Centre to compare this product against other global data sets. Jörg Kaduk, Dr., is lecturer for environmental modelling. He has 10 years experience in carbon cycle modelling and is co-investigator on two NERC funded research projects. Dr. Kaduk is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the EGU, AGU, ESA and BES. He has published over 15 papers in peer reviewed journals. Susan Page, Dr., has expertise in the ecology of tropical wetlands, their role in the global carbon cycle, and the impacts of land use change and fire. She is/has been involved in five EU-funded research projects focusing on sustainable land management in the tropics. Her current research addresses carbon-climate-human interactions on tropical peatlands, and involves developing techniques to assess post-fire vegetation recovery, fire risk and the emission of greenhouse gases. Example publications Balzter, H., Gerard, F.F., George, C.T., Rowland, C.S., Jupp, T.E., McCallum, I., Shvidenko, A., Nilsson, S., Sukhinin, A., Onuchin, A. and Schmullius, C. (2005): Impact of the Arctic Oscillation pattern on interannual forest fire variability in Central Siberia, Geophysical Research Letters 14, doi:10.1029/2005GL022526.