Abstract
Abstract. The location, timing, spatial extent, and frequency of wildfires are changing rapidly in many parts of the world, producing substantial impacts on ecosystems, people, and potentially climate. Paleofire records based on charcoal accumulation in sediments enable modern changes in biomass burning to be considered in their long-term context. Paleofire records also provide insights into the causes and impacts of past wildfires and emissions when analyzed in conjunction with other paleoenvironmental data and with fire models. Here we present new 1000-year and 22 000-year trends and gridded biomass burning reconstructions based on the Global Charcoal Database version 3 (GCDv3), which includes 736 charcoal records (57 more than in version 2). The new gridded reconstructions reveal the spatial patterns underlying the temporal trends in the data, allowing insights into likely controls on biomass burning at regional to global scales. In the most recent few decades, biomass burning has sharply increased in both hemispheres but especially in the north, where charcoal fluxes are now higher than at any other time during the past 22 000 years. We also discuss methodological issues relevant to data–model comparisons and identify areas for future research. Spatially gridded versions of the global data set from GCDv3 are provided to facilitate comparison with and validation of global fire simulations.
Highlights
Fire has long been recognized as an important ecological process because of its influence on species distributions and role in shaping other key ecosystem properties (Bond and Keeley, 2005)
Syntheses of data in the Global Charcoal Database (GCD), for example, reveal important variations in biomass burning during the last glacial period (Daniau et al, 2010), the last 21 000 years (Power et al, 2008; Daniau et al, 2012), and the last 2000 years (Marlon et al, 2008)
The majority of charcoal records included in the database (436 sites) are quantified using the pollen-slide method (POLS); 271 sites by sieving method (SIEV); sites using image analysis (IMAG); and sites were quantified using other methods such as hand picking charcoal from soil samples, gravimetric chemical assay (Winkler, 1985), and charcoal separation by heavy liquid preparation
Summary
Fire has long been recognized as an important ecological process because of its influence on species distributions and role in shaping other key ecosystem properties (Bond and Keeley, 2005). Syntheses of data in the Global Charcoal Database (GCD), for example, reveal important variations in biomass burning during the last glacial period (Daniau et al, 2010), the last 21 000 years (Power et al, 2008; Daniau et al, 2012), and the last 2000 years (Marlon et al, 2008). With the increasing number of sites in the GCD, regional syntheses became possible, including longterm analyses of climate and human influences on burning in Australasia (Mooney et al, 2011; Williams et al, 2015), the Mediterranean (Colombaroli et al, 2009; Vanniere et al, 2011), the western USA (Marlon et al, 2012), and the Americas more broadly (Whitlock et al, 2007; Power et al, 2012). We review several important limitations to charcoal-based records and identify promising future directions for the field
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