Climatic pacing of Mediterranean fire histories from lake sedimentary microcharcoal

Abstract

The microcharcoal content (particles < 180 µm) of overlapping sedimentary sequences from two crater lake basins in central Turkey are used to reconstruct the regional fire history of the East Mediterranean oak–grass parkland zone from the Last Glacial Maximum to the present-day. These results are correlated with stable isotope and pollen data from the same cores in order to assess the changing role of climate, vegetation and human activity in landscape burning. This indicates that climatically-induced variation in biomass availability was the main factor controlling the timing of regional fire activity during the Last Glacial–Interglacial climatic transition, and again during Mid-Holocene times, with fire frequency and magnitude increasing during wetter climatic phases. Spectral analysis of the Holocene part of the record from Eski Acıgöl indicates significant cyclicity with a periodicity of ~ 1500 years that may be linked with large-scale climate forcing. Although proto-agricultural societies were established in this region as early as 10,000 years ago, it is only during the last two to three millennia that the pacing of wildfire cycles appears to have become decoupled from climate and linked instead to human-induced changes in land cover and fuel load availability.