Fire has emerged as a dominant driver of change in tropical forests. In Amazonia, understory fire and degradation now affect an area comparable to the area deforested. Severe and frequent droughts, combined with widespread degradation, have caused areas with little recent history of fire to burn. There remains large uncertainty in how much carbon is lost to degradation, the time for degraded forests to recover structure, diversity, and carbon, and the role of fire in changing soil carbon fractions, including charcoal.

Soil radiocarbon analyses and new approaches to estimate pyrogenic carbon provide baseline data spanning centuries to millennia to assess modern fire regimes. Burn experiments, burn chronosequences, and plot networks assessing long-term change provide key ground-based data. Satellite data and modelling enable regional assessment and scaling. Combining these approaches and data can help to address knowledge gaps and large uncertainties in tropical carbon budgets. This session spans field, laboratory, remote sensing and modelling research on fire regimes, pyrogenic carbon, degradation and carbon in tropical forests. We invite contributions on:

--Reconstruction of fire history from soil charcoal radiocarbon, stable isotopes, and phytoliths and what it reveals about Holocene/pre-Columbian baselines for fires burning today;
--Pyrogenic carbon production, drivers, stocks, and turnover, and its role in soil fertility and carbon balance;
--Secondary and burned forest structure, tree composition, carbon stocks/fluxes, and their recovery following degradation;
--Controls on where and how tropical forests burn, including fire severity and intensity, flammability, and microclimate, and early-warning and forecasting;
--Approaches including Earth observation, forest and soil carbon models, soil respiration, scaling plot data to regional scales and assessing uncertainty.

Interdisciplinary contributions, work spanning tropical regions, and studies linking data over past and contemporary disturbance are especially welcome. Presentations by early career scientists and researchers based in tropical countries are encouraged.