Dr Mark Hardiman is a physical geographer whose research focuses on the investigation and reconstruction of past landscapes with particular emphasis on understanding the role of wildfires in, and in response to, rapid geomorphic and environmental events via charcoal analysis in both complex sediment sequences and high resolution palaeoenvironmental records. He has expertise in quantification, extraction and identification of charcoal fragments and the use of Bayesian statistics to produce highly robust age-depth models and charcoal radiocarbon data syntheses. 

Mark’s contribution to the UKFDRS project is to improve our understanding of UK fire trends over the historical period (the last 2000 years) in order to provide baselines for current UK wildfire trends.