User:SplashierSun/sandbox

Pyrogeography I plan to edit this page specifically in regards to paleoecology. I will explain how we know what we know based on charcoal and pollen data. And I will show how these proxy help our understanding of fire relationships. under Climate fire relationships I will try and add more detail to highlight the complexities of this and show how what we know can have an impact today. Fire regime Another article I could edit and expand on how we know what we know and explain charcoal as a proxy. Both of these articles need improvement on how we know what we know.

I am going to be editing the 1st article. I am going to expand on the methods used to reconstruct past fire history and what they tell us. Specifically talking about O18 pollen and most important charcoal data. I will also correct some of their over generalizations about climate change relating to fire patterns. Maybe expand on some of the factors that affect fires.

2 Sources: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1890/060161,

https://www-sciencedirect-com.prxy4.ursus.maine.edu/science/article/pii/S0378112714002308?_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_origin=gateway&_docanchor=&md5=b8429449ccfc9c30159a5f9aeaa92ffb&ccp=y

http://www.paleofire.org/ data base of charcoal data

1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4302794/ basics of charcoal awesome article

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4141710/

Paleoecology
Reconstructing an areas fire history is very helpful in figuring out the climactic conditions of an area along with its ecology. Our knowledge of past fire regimes comes from geochemistry, tree ring analysis, charcoal, written documents and archeology. Each of these has there pros and cons. For the purpose of paleoecology the charcoal data allows us to look very far back in time. Charcoal data from cores (lake or soil) gives us the ability to look back millennia and reconstruct the climate very accurately based on the relationship fire regimes have with the vegetation and climate. The charcoal first has to be extracted or washed from the sediments of the core. Then placed on a plate and counted under a microscope. These counts per sediment layer allows us to graph this out and see when fires occurred and with what intensity. The highest peaks are where the most charcoal was found and therefor had a more intense fire. Different ecosystems are more susceptible to fire due to climactic factors and what kinds of vegetation is present. Using this relationship between fire and vegetation present we can make inferences about the climate at that time. These inferences are based on the amount and kinds of charcoal found. As you can imagine different types of vegetation leave different charcoal. A Paleoecologists job is to count and figure out how much charcoal and what kinds of charcoal are present. These counts are later analyzed and looked at in conjunction to some of the other sources of data mentioned earlier. This allows the for the reconstruction of climates deep in the past using fire as a proxy. The affects of the fire can be seen using processes like Loss on ignition. This allows us to analyse the soil chemistry of area we are studying and to see how mineral and carbon percentages change as a result of the fire. Historical data can reveal the source or how the fire was started. This combined with pollen data (tells us what vegetative species are present) before and after the fire. All of these proxys help construct what the ecosystem of the studied area was like.