Journal
DENDROCHRONOLOGIA
Volume 30, Issue 2, Pages 137-145Publisher
ELSEVIER GMBH
DOI: 10.1016/j.dendro.2011.07.002
Keywords
Historical fire regimes; Fire scars; Top-down controls; Fire suppression; Natural disturbances; Hemi-boreal; Climate variability
Categories
Funding
- Joint Fire Science Program [05-2-1-86]
- Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC), The Ohio State University
- Seney National Wildlife Refuge
- Canada Research Chair in Ecology and Sustainable Forest Management, University of Quebec at Abitibi-Temiscamingue, Quebec, Canada
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The study of forests dominated by red pine (Pinus resinosa Alt.), one of the few fire-resistant tree species of eastern North America, provides an opportunity to reconstruct long-term fire histories and examine the temporal dynamics of climate forcing upon forest fire regimes. We used a 300-year long spatially explicit dendrochronological reconstruction of the fire regime for Seney National Wildlife Refuge (SNWR, 38,531 ha), eastern Upper Michigan to: (1) identify fire size thresholds with strong vs. weak climate controls, (2) evaluate effect of landform type (outwash channel vs. sand ridges) in modifying climate-fire associations, and (3) check for the presence of temporal changes in the climate control of large fire events over the time period 1700-1983. We used a summer drought sensitive red pine chronology (ITRDB code can037) as a proxy of past fire-related climate variability. Results indicated that fires >60 ha in sand-ridge-dominated portions of SNWR and >100 ha in outwash channels were likely climatically driven events. Climate-fire associations varied over time with significant climate-fire linkages observed for the periods 1700-1800 (pre-EuroAmerican), 1800-1900 (EuroAmerican settlement) and 1900-1983 (modern era). Although an increase in fire activity at the turn of 20th century is commonly associated with human sources of ignitions, our results suggest that such an increase was also likely a climatically driven episode. (C) 2012 Istituto Italiano di Dendrocronologia. Published by Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.
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