Abstract

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 IntCal20 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 1676 records (entities) from 1480 sites worldwide. The database (RPDv1b – Harrison et al., 2021) is available at https://doi.org/10.17864/1947.000345.

Highlights

  • The original age models for 67 (4 %) of the records included in the Reading Palaeofire Database (RPD) were derived solely by layer counting, U–Th or Pb dates, or isotopic correlation and are already expressed in calendar ages

  • New age models have been created for 807 (50 %) of the remaining charcoal records where the original chronology was based on radiometric dating

  • The Reading Palaeofire Database (RPD) is an effort to improve the coverage of charcoal records that can be used to investigate palaeofire regimes

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Summary

Introduction

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). Ice-core records provide a global picture of changes in wildfire in the geologic past (Rubino et al, 2016). It is useful to use information that can provide a picture of regional changes through time. The disparities between the archived age models preclude a detailed comparison of changes in wildfire regimes across regions. We present an expanded database of charcoal records (the Reading Palaeofire Database, RPD), accompanied by new age models based on recalibration of radiocarbon ages using IntCal (Reimer et al, 2020) and using a consistent Bayesian approach (Bacon – Blaauw et al, 2021) to agemodel construction. 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 the availability of metadata, relative to previous GCD compilations

Compilation of data
Structure of the database
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
Quality control
Overview of database contents
Findings
Conclusions
Full Text
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