Yicheng Shen
PhD Candidate
Yicheng has graduated as a MRes student studying ecosystems and environmental change at Imperial College London. She is interested in the relationships between fire, vegetation, climate and human beings in the past time and also at present day. In her master’s project, she built a present-day GLM fire model to explore fire relationships and developed a novel method of palaeofire reconstructions.
Yicheng works as a research assistant in the SPECIAL group as part of the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society. Currently, she is focusing on the development of a new method to derive quantitative fire-vegetation relationships using pollen and modern charcoal with the help of Tolerance-Weighted Averaging Partial Least-Squares with sampling frequency correction (fxTWA-PLS) and a present-day GLM fire model. She has tested this approach using the Iberian Peninsula as a case study. This new method opens up the possibility of reconstructing changes in fire regimes quantitatively from pollen records, which are far more extensive than charcoal records. She will expand the study region and investigate palaeofire relationships using the reconstructed fire data in the future study.