Near-future climate scenarios predict pervasive shifts in forest dynamics as a result of anthropogenic climate change. At the same time, acceleration of episodic ecosystem disturbances due to increasing fire intensity will likely lead to unprecedented terrestrial ecosystem disruptions. Considering these developments, a better understanding of the impact of fire intensity on past natural forest...
Fire, an important element of human land use strategies, was part of many early industrial activities but also of burning incidents that significantly impacted settlement structures and development. The spatial proximity of the historically well-documented medieval town and sediment archive deposited in its central lake (Stadtsee) was taken to investigate the interplay of fire and...
The Early Holocene is characterised by a set of climatic factors responsible for natural environmental fires. However, it is still debated whether humans also co-shaped the landscapes using fire in the Mesolithic period (~11.5–7.4 cal ka BP). Hypotheses on the anthropogenic fire impact during the Mesolithic period are often considered, but detailed, local scale, and well-dated...
Over the past decades, large and uncontrolled wildfires have occurred in all terrestrial ecosystems. Global warming may amplify this trend and threaten most ecosystems worldwide for the next decades. Alterations of fire regimes may affect fire-prone systems and forest ecosystems that have not historically experienced fires, such as the European beech forests. Understanding the long-term...
Fires are an important factor in the shaping of ecosystems and are closely related with climate change, vegetation and, especially in more recent times, human action. Charred particles in sedi-ment cores are widely used as proxies for the reconstruction of fire histories, with the ultimate goal of revealing the local paleofire history of certain catchment. In this project we examined the a...
Even though the boreal forests represent a significant biome within the Northern Hemisphere, there have not been studies of non-pollen palynomorphs (sub-fossil fungal spores and microscopic objects identified from pollen samples) devoted to untangling potentially missing information about the boreal forest dynamics. Therefore, it is crucial to test the potential of non-pollen palynomorphs in...
Recent climate change in Siberia is increasing the probability of dangerous forest fires. The development of effective measures to mitigate and prevent fires is impossible without an understanding of long-term fire dynamics. We present the new multi-site palaeo-fire reconstruction based on macroscopic charcoal data from 16 peat and lake sediment cores located in different landscapes across the...
The periodicity of fires in the Middle and Late Holocene in the vicinity of the village of Tura (central Evenkia) is considered according to the analysis of the concentration of macroscopic coal particles in peat bogs: Gornoye (64°13'55.97"N, 100°02'5.21"E) and Nizhnyaya Tunguska (64 °10'49.74"N, 100°34'59.16"E). The depth of the deposit of the Gornoe swamp is 215 cm, radiocarbon dating at the...
This study examines sediments from Deep Creek Lake (DCL) to reconstruct the past vegetation, climate and disturbance regimes for the area. DCL is located on Thousand Lakes Mountain in southern Utah. This high-elevation lake (approximately 3,200 meters) will provide a local record of environmental change for most of the Holocene. The lake core from this site produces a 9,000-year-old record...
Mongolia presents a great variety of landscapes and climate, depending on the altitude which differs between the boreal forests of mountainous regions of the Altai in the Northwest and the steppe regions of Central Mongolia. The vegetation and fire dynamics have been impacted by both climate and human activities, which have been present there since the Upper Palaeolithic (46000 - 12000 cal. yr...
Forest fires in the Siberian Arctic get larger, hotter and the fire season gets longer, which raises concerns if these fires might lead to biome shifts from tundra to summergreen or evergreen boreal forest – with consequences for regional to global biophysical land properties and biogeochemical cycles. Given the short time span of instrumental observations, it is unknown if fire can initiate...
Fire chronicles and the influence of climatic and anthropogenic factors on regional fire dynamics in the context of global climate change represent a great research interest in recent years. In our DFG supported project “Plant and land use of Early Iron Age societies in the boreal zone of the mid-Kama region and its environmental impact” we focus on the history of economic development in the...
The spread of a sedentary lifestyle and agricultural economy during Neolithic period, is considered a turning point for human impact on the environment in Central Europe. Early Neolithic (late 6th mill. – early 4th mill. BC) settlement in Silesia (SW Poland) was limited to areas with a loess-derived soil cover, where the landscape was transformed by vegetation clearance and establishment of a...
The paleofire dynamics in Russia of have been poorly studied to date, especially for the vast area of Siberia. The paper presents new results of a study of the Oshukovskoye peatbog, located in the Turo-Pyshminsky interfluve in the subtaiga zone of Western Siberia. In 3.7 m core macroscopic particles of charcoal in peat was count in each 2 sm, on the basis of which the patterns of changes in...
In palaeoecology, multi-site macro-charcoal analyses provide information on climate-fire-vegetation linkages, their spatial and temporal extent as well as the impact of prehistoric human practices. Our multi-site study comprises 8 macro-charcoal records from two highly continental forest-steppe regions in Western and North-Central Mongolia covering the Holocene. In addition to reviewing...
It is common practice to count charcoal particles alongside pollen and non‐pollen palynomorphs in palynological samples. The classification of material as charcoal is dependent upon a number of morphological criteria which, in certain geological zones like granitic and metamorphic areas, could be misclassified. In a preliminary study we tested the effects of different preparation techniques on...
Charcoal from sedimentary archives is widely used to reconstruct landscape vegetation-fire relationships from modern and ancient landscapes. Digital image analysis is speeding up measurements of sedimentary macro-charcoal, (i.e., grains or particles > ~125—10 000µm). Fire reconstructions now boast higher spatial, temporal, and stratigraphic resolutions. Also, the scope of charcoal analysis has...
The nature of the relationship between fire and climate change is yet to be fully understood, especially in arid ecosystems. Our current scientific understanding states that higher the length, frequency, and severity of a dry season, higher the chances of biomass burning, further increasing the likelihood of warm and dry periods that are already projected in the near future. The degree of...
For the next decades, climate in Mediterranean region is expected to be 25% warmer over the year than the rest of the planet, likely causing higher fire risks, longer fire seasons and more frequent, large, and severe fires. Understanding the processes shaping plant communities under fire is a core challenge in ecology and conservation science in this area: Is there a scheme of plant trait...
A massive forest fire that affected 1,300 hectares of the Bohemian Switzerland National Park in 2022 has sparked debate about the increasing threat of wildfires to society and nature in the Czech Republic. The question arose, is this unprecedented event outside the historical range of variability of the fire regime in the area? Charcoal records have been collected from several sites,...
One of the most visible ways humans are affecting the environment is our modification of wildfires. Nearly every type of human activity influences wildfires, including agriculture, spreading invasive species, and changing the climate, creating serious consequences for human societies and their environment. However, predicting fire interactions with land use, management, and climate change,...
In the last times, it became increasingly important to make data and also samples FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). Many Research Support Programs expect or encourage funded projects to make their results and data openly accessible. While open publications and data are commonly known, a more recent aspect are open samples. Physical samples or specimen are often at the...
The Global Paleofire Database (GPD) is a product of former PAGES Global Paleofire Working Groups and was also known as "Global Charcoal Database, GCD". It gathers sedimentary charcoal records from all over the globe in a accessible [repository][1] and is a community effort, mainly compiled for large-scale data syntheses projects.
Here, we present its history, current relevance and potential...
Created towards the end of the 1980s, pollen databases were the first data repositories that were publically available and served as a place for long term storage and as a research tool. From the beginning the European Pollen Database was an international effort including a larger group of people with some steering and guidance from North American palynologists. Eric Grimm was one of the...
The use of databases to answer complex environmental questions has enabled a quantitative and qualitative leap on our knowledge on global change. One of the terrestrial processes that best articulates the impacts of global change is fire. It is a phenomenon that depends on climatic conditions and fuel availability so burning captures processes such as global warming or rural abandonment. The...
We will introduce you to the Neotoma environment including explorer, Tilia and the Neotoma R package. The database uses API (application programming interface), which serve the explorer as well as Tilia but also let you query the database in R. We will show you which information you can most easily extract in either of these choices and provide a hands on R exercise on working with charcoal...
The set of functions gathered in the tapas R-package (https://github.com/wfinsinger/tapas) is meant to be used for analyzing paleoecological records when the goal is to estimate the long-term trend and identify peaks to reconstruct the occurrence, the return intervals, and the magnitude of distinct events. The package heavily builds on CharAnalysis, a software for analyzing sediment-charcoal...
The Upper Harz was one of the most important mining regions in Germany. Smelting of copper ores from the Harz probably started during the Bronze Age. Copper, silver, lead and iron ores were widely used especially during the late Middle Ages. The ores were taken to heavily forested areas for smelting, since far larger quantities of charcoal than ore were required for smelting. This meant that...
