Sparking New Opportunities for Charcoal-Based Fire History Reconstructions

Julie Aleman (1) , Andy Hennebelle (1) , Boris Vannière (2) , Olivier Blarquez (1)

1 UdeM - Université de Montréal
2 LCE - Laboratoire Chrono-environnement (UMR 6249)

Paleofire research is the study of past fire regimes using a suite of proxies (frequency, area burned, severity, intensity, etc.). Charcoal preserved in sedimentary archives constitutes one of the most ubiquitous measures of past fire regimes along with fire-scarred tree rings, chemical markers of fire, and black carbon residue [1,2]. The quantity of charcoal accumulating in sediments over time reflects changes in biomass burned and captures the range of its variability across multiple time scales (e.g., decadal to millennial [3]). The Global Paleofire Working Group Phase 2 (GPWG2; http://pastglobalchanges.org/ini/wg/gpwg2/intro) is a team of scientists interested in reconstructing past fire regimes in diverse environments. This paper provides a brief introduction to the evolution of charcoal-based paleofire science as a discipline and presents the outcome of the recent workshop organized by the GPWG2 in Montreal (October 2017), focusing on applications of paleofire knowledge to the management of a range of ecosystem challenges.The palynologist Iversen [4] was the first to study charcoal-based fire signals, on pollen slides, as a proxy for environmental change. But it was decades later, in the late 1960s and the 1970s, with the pioneering work of Waddington [5], Simmons [6], and Mehringer et al. [7], that Iversen’s approach became adopted by others. Charcoal-based paleofire research really emerged as a discipline during the 1990s, with an increasing number of publications (~20 paper year−1, Figure 1b), with the publication of seminal papers [3,8,9,10,11], as well as an incremental growth in the diversity of journals where charcoal-based paleofire research was being published (Figure 1b). Since 2005, however, charcoal-based paleofire science accelerated as a discipline, demonstrated by a sharp rise in the number of publications, indicating that the target audience of paleofire studies was expanding in scope

Domaines: Etudes de l'environnement

Julie Aleman, Andy Hennebelle, Boris Vannière, Olivier Blarquez. Sparking New Opportunities for Charcoal-Based Fire History Reconstructions. Fire Chief, 2018, 1 (1), pp.7. ⟨10.3390/fire1010007⟩. ⟨hal-01960980⟩