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Abstract:
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A century-long trend of increasing summer temperature in the Pacific Northwest, along with increasing loads of forest fuels, has raised concerns that forest fires are becoming more frequent, larger, and more difficult to control. We show how fire records are constructed from the detection of charcoal peaks in lake sediment cores. We then compare fire-event records of the past 5,000 years from two lakes that experienced the same late-Holocene climatic changes. Using such tools as the Weibull distribution and bivariate Ripley K-function, we evaluated the fire-interval distribution and fire synchroneity. Results indicate that sites with similar modern conditions may have experienced different fire intervals and asynchronous patterns in fire episodes and that the influence of climate on fire occurrence has varied with changing climatic variability over time.
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