Abstract
Sedimentary charcoal records are widely used to reconstruct regional changes in fire regimes through time in the geological past. Existing global compilations are not geographically comprehensive and do not provide consistent metadata for all sites. Furthermore, the age models provided for these records are not harmonised and many are based on older calibrations of the radiocarbon ages. These issues limit the use of existing compilations for research into past fire regimes. Here, we present an expanded database of charcoal records, accompanied by new age models based on recalibration of radiocarbon ages using IntCal20 and Bayesian age-modelling software. We document the structure and contents of the database, the construction of the age models, and the quality control measures applied. We also record the expansion of geographical coverage relative to previous charcoal compilations and the expansion of metadata that can be used to inform analyses. This first version of the Reading Palaeofire Database contains 1676 records (entities) from 1480 sites worldwide. The database (RPDv1b - Harrison et al., 2021) is available at 10.17864/1947.000345.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1109-1124 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Earth System Science Data |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 11 Mar 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 11 Mar 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Acknowledgements. Roberto Villegas-Diaz, Sandy P. Harrison, Esmeralda Cruz-Silva, and Yicheng Shen acknowledge support from the ERC-funded project GC2.0 (Global Change 2.0: Unlocking the past for a clearer future, grant number 694481). Sandy P. Harrison, Paul Lincoln, Daniel Gallagher, David Kesner, and Luke Sweeney acknowledge support from the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society through the Leverhulme Trust, grant number RC-2018-023. Angelica Feurdean acknowledges support from the German Research Foundation (grant no. FE-1096/6-1). Katarzyna Marcisz acknowledges support from the Swiss Government Excellence Postdoctoral Scholarship (grant no. FIRECO 2016.0310); the National Science Centre in Poland (grant no. 2015/17/B/ST10/01656); grant PSPB-013/2010 from Switzerland through the Swiss contribution to the enlarged European Union; and the Scientific Exchange Programme from the Swiss Contribution to the New Member States of the European Union and Switzerland (Sciex-NMSch) – SCIEX Scholarship Fund, project RE-FIRE 12.286. Olga Lisitsyna acknowledges support from the Mobilitas Plus post-doctoral research grant of the Estonian Research Council (MOBJD313). We would like to thank our many colleagues from the PAGES Global Paleofire Working Group for their contributions to the construction of the Global Charcoal Database, which provided the starting point for the current compilation, and our colleagues from the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society for discussions on the use of palaeodata to reconstruct past fire regimes. We thank Manfred Rösch for providing information on dating for several sites. We also thank Dan Gavin and Jack Williams for helpful reviews of the original manuscript.
Funding Information:
Financial support. This research has been supported by the Lev-erhulme Trust (grant no. RC-2018-023), the European Research Council (grant no. 694481), the German Research Foundation (grant no. FE-1096/6-1), the Swiss Government Excellence Postdoctoral Scholarships (grant no. FIRECO 2016.0310), the National Science Centre of Poland (grant no. 2015/17/B/ST10/01656), the SCIEX Scholarship Fund (grant no. PSPB-013/2010), and the Estonian Research Council (grant no. MOBJD313).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Sandy P. Harrison et al.