Powell Center Seminar: North America on fire: tree rings provide a multi-century perspective on increasing wildfire

By John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis August 27, 2024

Join us for a Powell Center seminar on Tuesday, September 10th, from 10-11am MT/12-1pm ET.

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North America on fire: tree rings provide a multi-century perspective on increasing wildfire - Chris Guiterman (CIRES & NOAA), Ellis Margolis (USGS), and Sean Parks (USDA)

Recent widespread fires across North America are unprecedented in our lifetimes, adversely affecting ecosystems and communities. This Powell Center working group sought an historical context to these trends by synthesizing the new North American tree-ring fire-scar network, which empowered a 400-year perspective on fire activity and fire-climate relationships, and informed future fire projections. Despite rapid increases in fire over the last few decades, forests across North America are burning much less than they did prior to 1900. Climate was an important historical driver of widespread synchronous fire at regional scales, suggesting that climate-driven fire years such as 2020 in the western U.S. and 2023 in Canada are likely to continue. Indeed, our models of future fire show increasing regional fire occurrence above pre-1900 levels. The insights we have gained will help us better understand the impacts of recent fire and enhance our ability to respond to ongoing and future wildfires.

Speakers:

Chris Guiterman is a Research Scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado-Boulder, where he works with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)-based World Data Service for Paleoclimatology, an organization that manages public archives of fire history data along with many other global paleoenvironmental proxy data. His research interests include dendrochronology, fire ecology, and the drivers of historical fire activity.

Ellis Margolis is a Research Ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Fort Collins Science Center, New Mexico Landscapes Field Station. His research tries to untangle the interactions between climate, fire, forests, and human land use.

Sean Parks is a Research Ecologist with the Rocky Mountain Research Station, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service. His research interests include 1) fire-climate relationships, 2) post-fire ecological trajectories, 3) departures between historical and contemporary fire regimes, 4) prescribed fire in wilderness, and 5) how climate-induced species range shifts will or will not unfold.