Workshops

Dartington I, UK, Palaeofires Workshop, 29 Oct - 4 Nov 2006

Motivation for Dartington I Workshop

The palaeo-record provides ideal opportunities for evaluating components of earth system models.
Charcoal records, in combination with information about changes in vegetation distribution, can
be used to evaluate state-of-art coupled vegetation-fire models. A preliminary compilation of
qualitative information about the change in fire regimes globally between the mid-Holocene and
today (Marlon and Bartlein, unpublished data) shows coherent patterns of regional change in fire
regime. However, for an adequate modeling test, this compilation had to be extended to cover
the globe and other time periods.

Achievements of first Dartington Workshop:

to demonstrate the extensiveness of the data coverage globally
to strengthen community perception that charcoal records will provide a useful tool for reconstructing changes in fire regimes during the late Quaternary
to create a database archive of charcoal records, currently containing 449 records but expected to at least double in size over the next year
to create maps of changing fire regimes for key times in the past and use these to evaluate model simulations of fire regimes during the last glacial maximum and the mid-Holocene
to initiate work on two papers (Power et al., Marlon et al.) which, in addition to documenting the analyses carried out at the workshop, will publicise the Palaeofires component of the IGBP FTI on Fire
to create concrete plans to take this work forward over the next few years.

Download the report on the first Dartington Hall workshop

Dartington II, UK, Palaeofires Workshop, 22 Oct - 26 Oct 2007

Plans are in progress