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Steven McKenzieHighlands and Islands reporter
Peter Jolly/Northpix
The Dava Moor fire started in late June
A wildfire that burned for four days across parts of the Highlands and Moray last year was the UK's first megafire, say researchers.
They said the fire on Dava Moor torched as much land as typically burns across the UK in an entire year.
The fire in a vast area of moorland around Grantown-on-Spey and Forres started on 28 June.
It came just days after a wildfire at nearby Carrbridge which reignited on multiple occasions times over 11 days before being fully extinguished.
Scottish Land and Estates (SLE) estimated that together the wildfires burned 29,225 acres (11,827 hectares) - an area almost 30 times bigger than Lanarkshire's Strathclyde Park.
Wildfires at Dava and Carrbridge are estimated to have burned across 29,225 acres of land
The new research was led by scientists at Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, which is part of California's Stanford University.
Experts affiliated with universities in England and the Netherlands were also involved, and some of the funding for the study came from the UK Space Agency and the US space agency Nasa.
Researchers, who combined fieldwork with satellite data, suggested that "unusually dry conditions" and "flammable vegetation" enabled the fire to burn deep peat soils.
They said the wildfire released carbon equivalent to 85% of the average annual emissions from fires across the UK from 2001 to 2021.
Thousands of acres of land were damaged by the fire
Adam Pellegrini, an assistant professor of Earth system science, said: "Peatlands are found all over Earth, from the tropics to the Arctic Circle, and they each have distinctive characteristics and vulnerabilities when it comes to climate change.
"The outbreak of the Dava Moor fire gave us a unique opportunity to study one of these fire-impacted peatlands up close."
He added: "This study demonstrates why there needs to be more attention paid to preserving peatlands and addressing wildfires in areas where peatlands have served as long-term carbon reservoirs."
Earlier this year, the Scottish government warned that Scotland was facing a serious and escalating threat from wildfires.
It launched a new strategy to deal with the problem and help improve co-ordination between the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and others who respond to the incidents.
