As the Earth's climate continues to change, rising temperatures and prolonged dry conditions are impacting wildfire behavior. Recent decades have witnessed an increase in the intensity, extent, and frequency of wildfires in fire-adapted regions. Moreover, areas historically less prone to fires are now experiencing such events, a trend projected to become more widespread. These changing fire regimes are imposing significant stress on both natural ecosystems and human communities. Our current understanding of global-to-local fire dynamics is primarily limited to the past few decades, with qualitative to semi-quantitative records extending into the early 20th century. While model-based projections offer insights into how climate variability will influence future wildfire behavior over sub-annual to decadal scales, paleoclimate research provides a unique perspective on the historical relationship between hydroclimate and wildfires, predating widespread human fire management, at regional to global scales and across multiple climate states. In recent years, a growing body of work has connected multi-proxy environmental data from diverse terrestrial archives, such as trees, sedimentary cores, ice cores, and speleothems, to fire-related markers found within these archives, including fire scars, charcoal, pyrogenic organic compounds, ash, SOx and NOx concentrations, and more.

This session focuses on research that investigates the historical link between wildfires and climate. It encompasses the development and application of innovative proxies and archives, as well as the use of earth-system models. Submissions are encouraged to target sub-millennial temporal resolutions, with an emphasis on sub-decadal (e.g., prolonged droughts) to seasonal (e.g., extended dry seasons, hotter and drier summers) time scales. We also welcome contributions related to technical and analytical advancements in organic and inorganic geochemical analyses, statistical improvements, in-situ calibration studies, proxy system modeling, fire reconstruction models, and paleodata-model comparisons. Special attention is given to research that has unique potential to inform future fire mitigation strategies and land-management policies.