Please note that this session was withdrawn and is no longer available in the respective programme. This withdrawal might have been the result of a merge with another session.
CL5.7 | Novel proxies for understanding past fires: outcomes for land and ecosystem management
EDI
Novel proxies for understanding past fires: outcomes for land and ecosystem management
Convener: Micheline Campbell | Co-conveners: Liza McDonoughECSECS, Yuval Burstyn, Kathleen Johnson, Pauline Treble
Approximately 40% of the Earth’s terrestrial surface is fire-prone, with wildfires likely to become larger, more common, and more severe with climate change. To date, our understanding of fires is largely limited to the last few decades, when satellite imagery is available. However, satellite products do not capture the full range of past natural climate variability and anthropogenic forcing (e.g., the agrarian revolution, migration into the Americas and European colonisation). Better understanding of how climate, vegetation communities, and anthropogenic activity interact to affect fire regimes is necessary for the development of land management strategies to mitigate the impact of climate change. Environmental proxy data from tree fire scars, sedimentary charcoal cores, ice cores, and speleothems can be used to investigate how changes in climate, land use, and human activity drive changes in fire regimes. This session aims to highlight research which has the potential to produce tangible outcomes for ecosystem management and land use policy. We encourage submissions which highlight the links between fire and climate, or which make use of novel proxies, proxy archives, or statistical approaches. We particularly welcome submissions of records at human-relevant temporal resolutions (seasonal to decadal), and which examine the impact of changed land management practices (e.g. from Indigenous to colonial and post-colonial land management systems) on modern fire activity.