The history of fire, human and climate in black pine forests of western Anatolia: The Taurus mountains

Abstract

The interactions between fire occurrence-human-climate are highly complex to understand and also difficult to predict due to having many sources of variations in fire regimes. However, we can gather information about the effect of human influence on the regional fire regimes where human influence is high, and the history of locations is well-known by conducting retrospective fire history studies in locations. Here, we present the impact of human settlements on fire occurrence by comparing and discussing the previous drought-driven tree-ring-based fire history reconstruction sites in western Anatolia. For this purpose, we collected cross-sections from Miyarcık highland, Antalya, and developed a 519–y long (1503–2021 CE) composite fire chronology using dendrochronological methods. Our study site location is known for the seasonal inhabitants of “Yörüks”, who led a nomadic life in the Taurus Mountains for centuries, and forests were used for livestock grazing. Since the temperatures increase significantly at the beginning of spring in the lower elevations of Antalya, the yörüks move towards the upper highlands with their animals from May to November. We found lower fire frequency and no fire-climate association compared to other sites that experienced drought-driven wildfires, even though this site is located in a high-fire-risk region. Low-frequency fires might be due to moderate-level livestock grazing by yörüks in this area. Grazing contributes to reducing the amount of accumulated combustible materials, causes discontinuity of fuel in the understory of forests, and affects the dynamics of the spatial distribution of wildfires. This study showed that moderate-level grazing might support effective fire management activities as fuel management because of modifying the fuel properties, changing the fuel-fire interaction (e.g., the fuel continuity and amount of accumulated fuel), and reducing the wildfire probability over space and time.