POSTGLACIAL CLIMATE AND FIRE‐MEDIATED VEGETATION CHANGE ON THE WESTERN OLYMPIC PENINSULA, WASHINGTON

Abstract

It is difficult to study responses of old-growth forests to climate change due to significant inertia in the population response of established trees to a change in climate. Paleoecological approaches, such as pollen analysis from small lakes, may address such questions, but due to limitations in pollen data it is difficult to understand population responses at the grain at which trees are competing. This study used a stratigraphic record of needle macrofossils and charcoal, representing local forests and fires, to show that fire could break the forest's inertia to climate change, but often only several centuries after landscape-level vegetation change was underway. Forest on the northwest shore of Yahoo Lake, on the western portion of the Olympic Peninsula. Old-growth forests of western redcedar, Pacific silver fir, and western hemlock surround the lake. Photograph by Daniel Gavin. These photographs illustrate the article “Postglacial climate and fire-mediated vegetation change on the western Olympic Peninsula, Washington,” by Daniel G. Gavin, Linda B. Brubaker, and D. Noah Greenwald, tentatively scheduled to appear in Ecological Monographs 83(4), November 2013. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/12-1742.1