Abstract

Abstract In oak (Quercus) savannas in the Midwest region of the United States, fire continues to play a significant role in its persistence within the landscape; however, in southeastern Wisconsin, quantified fire history records are limited. This study documented occurrences of fire for the last 200 y using 16 cross-dated oak sections from an oak savanna remnant in Kenosha County, Wisconsin. Fire history was reconstructed by: (1) obtaining fire-scarred cross sections from cut down oaks in an area planned for an industrial park, (2) preparing sample surfaces to count rings, (3) creating skeleton plots to crossdate samples, (4) dating fire scars, (5) calculating intervals between fires and (6) determining seasonality of the fire. In addition, a master chronology was constructed for the oak savanna using the cross sections to correlate with precipitation. Throughout the entire time series, only 50% of the fire dates were associated with significantly dry years. Although the overall Weibull median interval w...

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