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…
Category: GCD v3
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…
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…
16th Century burning decline in the Americas: Population collapse or climate change? (Power et al. 2012)
During the Holocene, the last 11,000 years, climate, vegetation, and likely, humans have been key controls to changing fire regimes in the Americas. A long-accepted paradigm is that of the ‘noble savage’, whereby indigenous peoples lived in harmony within a pristine…
Global biomass burning: a synthesis and review of Holocene paleofire records and their controls (Marlon et al. 2012)
We synthesize existing sedimentary charcoal records to reconstruct Holocene fire history at regional, continental and global scales. The reconstructions are compared with the two potential controls of burning at these broad scales – changes in climate and human activities –…
Late Quaternary fire regimes of Australasia (Mooney 2011)
We have compiled 223 sedimentary charcoal records from Australasia in order to examine the temporal and spatial variability of fire regimes during the Late Quaternary. While some of these records cover more than a full glacial cycle, here we focus…
