Abstract
Paleoecology has demonstrated potential to inform current and future land management by providing long-term baselines for fire regimes, over thousands of years covering past periods of lower/higher rainfall and temperatures. To extend this potential, more work is required for methodological innovation able to generate nuanced, relevant and clearly interpretable results. This paper presents records from Cape York Peninsula, Queensland, Australia, as a case study where fire management is an important but socially complex modern management issue, and where palaeofire records are limited. Two new multiproxy palaeofire records are presented from Sanamere Lagoon (8,150–6,600 cal BP) and Big Willum Swamp (3,900 cal BP to present). These records combine existing methods to investigate fire occurrence, vegetation types, and relative fire intensity. Results presented here demonstrate a diversity of fire histories at different sites across Cape York Peninsula, highlighting the need for finer scale palaeofire research. Future fire management planning on Cape York Peninsula must take into account the thousands of years of active Indigenous management and this understanding can be further informed by paleoecological research.
Highlights
The response of fire under changing climate conditions is an increasingly critical management issue in Australian environments and globally (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation [CSIRO], 2009, 2021)
The Sanamere Lagoon record presented here spans the mid-Holocene, from approximately 8,150 to 6,600 cal BP (Supplementary Figure 1), noting sedimentation at the site is documented as having begun in the Pleistocene (Comley, 2017; Rivera Araya et al, 2020)
The elongate charcoal particles in SAN1 are interpreted as deriving from C3 sedges, rather than deriving from grasses which are predominantly C4 in northern Australia (Rehn et al, in press)
Summary
The response of fire under changing climate conditions is an increasingly critical management issue in Australian environments and globally (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation [CSIRO], 2009, 2021). Paleoecological studies have great potential to provide longterm baselines to better understand “linkages between climate, vegetation, fire regimes and humans” (Gillson et al, 2019, p.1) which is a critical research area worldwide (Bowman et al, 2011). This could improve modeling of future fire conditions under climate change, based on observations of conditions under past climatic shifts, and thereby inform present-day land management. We examine Cape York Peninsula, Queensland, as an ideal location to begin investigating the possibilities of paleoecology within fire-prone tropical savanna environments
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