Abstract
Climatic conditions exert an important influence on wildfire activity in the western United States; however, Indigenous farming activity may have also shaped the local fire regimes for millennia. The Fish Lake Plateau is located on the Great Basin–Colorado Plateau boundary, the only region in western North America where maize farming was adopted then suddenly abandoned. Here we integrate sedimentary archives, tree rings, and archeological data to reconstruct the past 1200 years of fire, climate, and human activity. We identify a period of high fire activity during the apex of prehistoric farming between 900 and 1400 CE, and suggest that farming likely obscured the role of climate on the fire regime through the use of frequent low-severity burning. Climatic conditions again became the dominant driver of wildfire when prehistoric populations abandoned farming around 1400 CE. We conclude that Indigenous populations shaped high-elevation mixed-conifer fire regimes on the Fish Lake Plateau through land-use practices.
Highlights
Climatic conditions exert an important influence on wildfire activity in the western United States; Indigenous farming activity may have shaped the local fire regimes for millennia
Sedimentary proxies were collected from Fish Lake, located in south-central Utah on the boundary between the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau (i.e., the Basin-Plateau Region (Fig. 1))
Fish Lake is an ideal study site to investigate fire–climate–human interactions given the coupled records of past fire activity and vegetation change through sedimentary archives alongside tree-ring reconstructions of drought, combined with a well-documented Late Holocene archeological record that was used to generate past human activity estimates (Fig. 1)
Summary
Climatic conditions exert an important influence on wildfire activity in the western United States; Indigenous farming activity may have shaped the local fire regimes for millennia. Drought, is considered to be the dominant driver of fire in the west[9,10], recent research in the Sierra Nevada Mountains illustrated that human-caused fire, not lightningcaused fire, best approximated changes in forest composition during prolonged periods of cool and wet conditions[11,12]. These data suggest that Indigenous people may have played an important role in shaping mountain fire regimes in the past.
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