Lessons from the Past: Linking the Paleofire Record and Fire Management in the Context of a Warming World

Natural fires and climate have structured the evolution of vegetation and ecosystems worldwide. Fire regimes are closely coupled with climatic conditions, ignition sources, and the properties of the combustible material. Past human activities have led to significant modifications of natural fire regimes and, consequently, of the environment. However, accelerating climate change impacts coupled with anthropogenic activities over the past decades have resulted in fires being observed to be more frequent and severe, and to occur in areas where they were not often recorded in the past. This has led to disastrous consequences for ecosystems, hydrology, and soil erosion, with cascading positive feedbacks being compounded by progressing warming scenarios. Therefore, knowledge of long-term fire histories allows for an understanding of how and where fire regimes varied with changes in climate, vegetation composition, and human-vegetation interaction, and can serve as an important base for developing suitable fire management practices in a warming world.

This Research Topic aims to strengthen and promote paleofire studies that describe long-term paleofire changes in order to develop the most relevant fire characteristics from proxies. In turn, this will serve to help tackle fire management issues. We welcome the submission of original research including long-term fire reconstructions (biomass burning, fire frequency, and fire severity changes), inferences from combined paleofire proxy records and multi-proxy environmental reconstructions, as well as calibration and validation of paleofire proxies (e.g. new methodologies to better understand the taphonomic processes governing the production, transport, and deposition of charcoal in lake sediments, forest soils or peat bogs; development of the most relevant fire characteristics that help explain the charcoal influx into various archives). Submissions that investigate ecosystem resilience, resistance, and degradation in relation to fire activity are also welcome. We also welcome submissions that recognize current fire and forest management issues with an intention to help fire management planning and the development of conservation protocols. This Research Topic is expected to provide a wide view on current developments in paleofire research that promote the application into ecosystem management.

Potential topics include (but are not limited to) the following:
• Paleofire reconstructions from various archives and covering various temporal scales;
• Looking for paleofire baselines in different types of biomes;
• Proxy calibration and validation studies for conventional paleofire proxies (charcoal) as well as for novel proxies (e.g. biomarkers);
• Ecological responses such as regime shifts, tipping points, ecosystem resilience, resistance, and degradation to fire;
• Forest disturbance, post-fire regeneration, and implications for fire and forest management.

This Research Topic is open to submissions presenting original research as well as synthesis and review papers.