We are please to announce that the GCD and paleofire R packages have been updated to their 4.0.2 and 1.2.2 versions, respectively. GCD major update from 3.X.X to 4.X.X version number is associated to extensive changes in the way data…
Category: Analyses
Perspective: Sparking New Opportunities for Charcoal-Based Fire History Reconstructions
We are happy to share the last GPWG2 paper published as a perspective in Fire. This perspective is a product of the last GPWG2 workshop held in Montréal October 2017. We wish to thank all the workshop participants and PAGES and…
Biomass Burning on the Rise Again
Levels of biomass burning in parts of the world are now higher than at any time in the past 22,000 years, according to our most recent fire history reconstructions from the Global Charcoal Database version 3 (GCDv3), just published today in…
7000-year human legacy of elevation-dependent European fire regimes
Highlights: • 18 southern European charcoal records document 16,000 years of fire regime changes. • Since the Neolithic, land uses have artificially maintained high fire frequencies. • Human-induced decreases in forest cover led to a reduction in the biomass burned.…
Reconstructions of biomass burning from sediment charcoal records to improve data-model comparisons
Abstract. The location, timing, spatial extent, and frequency of wildfires are changing rapidly in many parts of the world, producing substantial impacts on ecosystems, people, and potentially climate. Paleofire records based on charcoal accumulation in sediments enable modern changes in…
paleofire: An R package to analyse sedimentary charcoal records from the Global Charcoal Database to reconstruct past biomass burning
Abstract: We describe a new R package, paleofire, for analysis and synthesis of charcoal time series, such as those contained in the Global Charcoal Database (GCD), that are used to reconstruct paleofire activity (past biomass burning). paleofire is an initiative of…
A 21 000-Year History of Fire (Power, 2013)
This chapter provides a global perspective on palaeofire activity through the analysis of over 650 stratigraphic sedimentary charcoal records spanning the last 21000 years. Regional time series analysis provides empirical evidence for global-scale trends in fire since the last glacial…
Circum-Mediterranean fire activity and climate changes during the mid-Holocene environmental transition (8500-2500 cal. BP) (Vannière et al. 2011)
A mid- to late-Holocene synthesis of fire activity from the Mediterranean basin explores the linkages among fire, climate variability and seasonality through several climatic and ecological transitions. Regional fire histories were created from 36 radiocarbon-dated sedimentary charcoal records, available from…
Predictability of biomass burning in response to climate changes (Daniau et al. 2012)
Climate is an important control on biomass burning, but the sensitivity of fire to changes in temperature and moisture balance has not been quantified. We analyze sedimentary charcoal records to show that the changes in fire regime over the past…
Long-term perspective on wildfires in the western USA (Marlon et al. 2012)
Understanding the causes and consequences of wildfires in forests of the western United States requires integrated information about fire, climate changes, and human activity on multiple temporal scales. We use sedimentary charcoal accumulation rates to construct long-term variations in fire…
