Contributions of a century-old iconographic corpus to improve the understanding of past fire dynamics in the Fontainebleau forest, France

In oceanic temperate forests, as in more fire-prone ecosystems, fire contributes to shape the environment, define relationships between nature and society, orient forest uses, and influence biogeochemical cycles in ways that still need to be better understood. Fire weather is expected to increase also in these ecosystems over the coming decades, raising major concerns, and highlighting the need to better understand their past dynamics and biogeochemical implications. The Fontainebleau forest, located in France’s Ile-de-France region, has been documented since the 11^th century, when it first became a royal forest, and is now a famous and highly frequented forest. At the crossroads of multiple uses, its management has evolved in response to numerous and sometimes antagonistic activities, such as hunting, timber harvesting, sand and sandstone quarrying, and, in recent centuries, the development of tourism, outdoor activities, and a significant artistic movement, the Barbizon school. The ecological and biogeochemical role of fire in such a socio-ecosystem is to be clarified. Our hypothesis is that the large amount of documentation available on this forest can help better understand past fire dynamics and their biogeochemical implications. What does available documentation reveal? A selection work in the existing iconographic archives led to the creation of a corpus representing fire in the Fontainebleau forest comprising 10 postcards, 9 engravings, 1 painting and 15 photographs dating from 1860 to 1911, as well as contemporary images of the ecological succession after a fire. Combining these images with the data from the 3FD database ⁽¹⁾, we extract different types of information. In particular, we give visual evidence of type of fire (understory or peat), most exposed vegetation, and evolution of the management practices of fire (organisation of the reaction to fire). We also show how the geographical information and the images themselves  can help  to set up an experimental design and conduct field work, which will then enable us to carry out and interpret biogeochemical analyses.  We also discuss the originality of this material.

 

Reference :

(1) Chevalier, M., Abiven, S., & Lebrun Thauront, J. (2024). Fontainebleau Forest Fires Database (3FD), version 1.0 [Data set]. In Fire Ecology. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13305154