Abstract
Indigenous land use and climate have shaped fire regimes in southeast Australia during the Holocene, although their relative influence remains unclear. The archaeologically attested mid-Holocene decline in land-use intensity on the Furneaux Group islands (FGI) relative to mainland Tasmanian and SE Australia presents a natural experiment to identify the roles of climate and anthropogenic land use. We reconstruct two key facets of regional fire regimes, biomass (vegetation) burned (BB) and recurrence rate of fire episodes (RRFE), by using total charcoal influx and charcoal peaks in palaeoecological records, respectively. Our results suggest climate-driven biomass accumulation and dryness-controlled BB across southeast Australia during the Holocene. Insights from the FGI suggest people elevated the recurrence rate of fire episodes through frequent cultural burning during the early Holocene and reduction in recurrent Indigenous cultural burning during the mid–late Holocene led to increases in BB. These results provide long-term evidence of the effectiveness of Indigenous cultural burning in reducing biomass burned and may be effective in stabilizing fire regimes in flammable landscapes in the future.
Highlights
Fire has been part and parcel of the Australian landscape for millions of years, with fireadapted plant species widespread across the continent [1,2,3,4]
A non-linear relationship was observed between recurrence rate of fire episodes (RRFE) and biomass burned (BB) on the Furneaux Group islands (FGI), confirming that total charcoal influx and influx peaks are measures of different aspects of fire regimes on the landscape; in other words, high RRFE is not always associated with high levels of biomass burning (Figure 3)
Islands (FGI) suggest recurrent Indigenous cultural burning was mainly associated with less biomass accumulation and burning
Summary
Fire has been part and parcel of the Australian landscape for millions of years, with fireadapted plant species widespread across the continent [1,2,3,4]. Moisture variability and vegetation type are the major biogeographic drivers of fire regimes in Australian landscapes [4,5,6,7]. Localized factors, such as human activity, topography and herbivory are key drivers of fire regimes globally [8,9]. While efforts have been made to separate the effects of Indigenous fire use from climate as cause of vegetation change (e.g., [21,22]), the regional-scale aspects of fire regimes (amount of biomass burned and recurrence rate of fire) that are influenced by past Indigenous land use remain unclear. The role of climate change in past fire regimes is not fully understood and confounded by persistent anthropogenic land use during the Holocene [23,24]
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