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...
