Collaborative Research: Resolving past fire-climate relationships to understand future fire potential in the eastern United States

The climatic and anthropogenic controls of fire in the eastern United States (US) are understudied relative to other areas of the US. Despite recent fire events and suggestions that anthropogenic climate change will drive longer, more intense fire seasons, the understanding of long-term fire-climate relationships in eastern US forests remains limited. The project will inform broader scientific understanding of the future fire risks of the region. Wildfire events and seasons in the eastern US are increasingly affecting people, ecology, and land management, so this project will provide direct societal benefits by generating new science to inform wildfire-related climate adaptation efforts. The project will work with US Geological Survey Climate Adaptation Science Centers to communicate findings to regional scientists, stakeholders and policymakers. The project also includes education and training of graduate and undergraduate students, as well as educational outreach with middle and high school students. The goal of this project is to better resolve regional fire-climate relationships through the development and analysis of Holocene (last ~12,000 years) paleofire records and to better define controls on current and projected fire potential. By analyzing particulate and molecular by-products of wildfires preserved in sediment records (e.g., lakes, wetlands) spanning the Holocene, the project will compare fire and climate histories prior to the onset of human impacts to landscapes as a means of understanding baseline fire-climate relationships in the region. In addition to collecting new empirical data, the project will also leverage existing paleoclimate datasets to better resolve regional fire-climate relationships and better define controls on future fire potential. Empirical data will be compared to transient paleoclimate model simulations to enable quantitative characterization of region-specific fire activity and relationships to past and future climate changes based on trend analysis, statistical modeling, and application of select fire indices. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.