Research Paper Summaries

A European rewilding report finds land use, wildfire risk, livelihoods and local trust can be as important as wildlife in shaping conflict.

Environment Agency guidelines split upland blanket bog into six types by how water moves. What the evidence shows and where its gaps lie for moorland managers.

Survey of 2,424 Guns, beaters and pickers-up found higher wellbeing and less loneliness than national figures, most of all among the over-75s.

We checked Rewilding Britain's wildfire report: no managed-land baseline, no fuel or severity data, and weak UK peat evidence. Six questions it must answer.

The claim that a wetter bog sheds its flammable heather has never been directly tested in UK uplands — and the evidence shows heather thriving on wet peat.

FireInSite uses UK vegetation measurements, weather and terrain to predict wildfire behaviour, with encouraging early tests and further validation needed.

UK curlew have fallen 49% since 1995. Four studies find keepered grouse moor fledges nearly four times as many chicks. Evidence for Defra's gamebird call.

University of Nottingham says rewetting is still essential but wants stability checked in deep peat and on slopes, where modelled stable depth falls to 0.27m at 12°.

WMO's 2026 bulletin finds extreme fire-smoke events have tripled since the 1990s and that standard models may undercount wildfire deaths.

BTO modelling puts Curlew stability at 1.06 chicks hatched per pair, not the 0.6 fledged figure often quoted. Why the two differ, and what it means for the uplands.

A study on the Langdale Moor fire finds managed heather patches burned less severely, sparing an estimated 7,000 tonnes of soil carbon.

A moorland fire is really two fires. Why rewetting and managing the fuel solve two different problems — and why the uplands need both.