HR: 14:10h
AN: B43E-03    [Abstracts]
TI: Fire and Climate: Past, Present (and Future?)
AU: * Brown, P M
EM: pmb@rmtrr.org
AF: Rocky Mountain Tree-Ring Research, 2901 Moore Ln, Ft. Collins, CO 80526 United States
AU: Wu, R
EM: rwu@fs.fed.us
AF: San Juan National Forest, 15 Burnett Court, Durango, CO 81301 United States
AB: Absolutely dated fire histories based on fire scars recorded in tree rings provide evidence of the relationships between fire and climate over the past several centuries. Fire/climate relationships demonstrated in paleo-records offer some predictive capability for not only seasonal to annual wildfire forecasts but also some indication where fire regimes and ecosystems might be heading under scenarios for current and future climate change. Broad-scale networks of fire-scar chronologies have been developed from forests across most of western North America. These chronologies, when compared to independently derived tree-ring and other proxy based reconstructions of hydroclimate and circulation indices, exhibit strong scaling with regionally synchronous fire years driven by broad-scale droughts and synoptic features such as the El Ni¤o- Southern Oscillation (ENSO). This talk will discuss methods for reconstructing fire histories and fire climatologies from tree-ring data, how climate forcing affected fire occurrences in the past and what this may tell us about the future, and what effects that several decades of fire exclusion and changes in forest structure may have on future fire regimes and ecosystem responses.
DE: 3344 Paleoclimatology
DE: 4522 El Ni¤o
DE: 1812 Drought
DE: 1851 Plant ecology
SC: Biogeosciences [B]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting