Abstract
OSC-Oxford
26-28, March
Paleofires: observations and simulations of the impact of climate change on biomass
burning
M. Power1, J. Marlon2, K. Thonicke3, N. Ortiz3, P. Bartlein2, S. P. Harrison3, F. Mayle1,
and IGBP Paleofire FTI Participants
Global fire regimes have responded to long-term changes in global climate since the last
Glacial Maximum. Fire has a key role in ecosystem disturbance and global carbon
emissions, and increasingly poses serious threats to human activities. To understand the
climate and environmental controls on fire regimes in order to provide a more robust
assessment of likely future changes, we have examined the linkages among climate,
vegetation, fire, and human activities on millennial timescales by comparing evidence of
changes in fire activity since the Last Glacial Maximum, and comparing these
reconstructions with model simulations for three key time slices, 21,000, 6000, and 0 cal
years BP. A newly created global sedimentary charcoal database was used to establish
the long-term incidence of fire and the coupled vegetation-fire LPJ-SPITFIRE model was
used to simulate spatial patterns in global fire regimes for these key time slices. Datamodel comparisons provide a unique opportunity to identify the controls of changing fire
regimes and evaluate the performance of models when simulating past and future fire
activity.
1
University of Edinburgh
University of Oregon
3
University of Bristol
2