Abstract

Sedimentary charcoal records are widely used to reconstruct regional changes in fire regimes through time in the geological past. Existing global compilations are not geographically comprehensive and do not provide consistent metadata for all sites. Furthermore, the age models provided for these records are not harmonised and many are based on older calibrations of the radiocarbon ages. These issues limit the use of existing compilations for research into past fire regimes. Here, we present an expanded database of charcoal records, accompanied by new age models based on recalibration of radiocarbon ages using INTCAL2020 and Bayesian age-modelling software. We document the structure and contents of the database, the construction of the age models, and the quality control measures applied. We also record the expansion of geographical coverage relative to previous charcoal compilations and the expansion of metadata that can be used to inform analyses. This first version of the Reading Palaeofire Database contains 1681 records (entities) from 1477 sites worldwide. The database (DOI: 10.17864/1947.319) is available from https://researchdata.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/319.

Highlights

  • We present an expanded database of charcoal records, accompanied by 8 new age models based on recalibration of radiocarbon ages using INTCAL2020 and Bayesian 9 age-modelling software

  • The pre-industrial past provides an opportunity to characterise fire regimes before anthropogenic influences, both in terms of ignitions and fire suppression, became important. 32 Ice-core records provide a global picture of changes in wildfire in the geologic past (Rubino et 33 al., 2016)

  • The disparities between the archived age models preclude a detailed comparison of changes in wildfire regimes across regions. 66 Here, we present an expanded database of charcoal records, accompanied by new age models based on recalibration of radiocarbon ages using INTCAL2020 (Reimer et al, 2020) and using a consistent Bayesian approach (BACON: Blaauw. et al, 2021) to age-model construction

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Summary

Introduction

16 17 Wildfires have major impacts on terrestrial ecosystems (Bond et al, 2005; Bowman et al, 2016; He et al, 2019; Lasslop et al, 2020), the global carbon cycle (Li et al, 2014; Arora and Melton, 2018; Pellegrini et al, 2018; Lasslop et al, 2019), atmospheric chemistry (van der Werf et al, 2010; Voulgarakis and Field, 2015; Sokolik et al, 2019) and climate (Randerson et al, 2006; Li et al, 2017; Harrison et al, 2018; Liu et al, 2019). 32 Ice-core records provide a global picture of changes in wildfire in the geologic past (Rubino et al., 2016). 43 The Global Palaeofire Working Group (GPWG) was established in 2006 to coordinate the compilation and analysis of charcoal data globally, through the construction of the Global Charcoal Database (GCD: Power et al, 2008). The disparities between the archived age models preclude a detailed comparison of changes in wildfire regimes across regions. We document the structure and contents of the database, the construction of the new age models, the expanded metadata available, and the quality control measures applied to check the data entry. We document the expansion of the geographic and temporal coverage, and in the availability of metadata, relative to previous GCD compilations. 75

Data and Methods
Site metadata (table name: site)
Entity metadata (table name: entity)
Sample metadata and data (table name: sample)
Dating information (table name: date info)
Publication information (table name: publication)
Original age model information (table name: chronology)
New age model information (table name: age_model)
Construction of new age models
Findings
Conclusions
Full Text
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