Definition
Fire history is the study of the spatial and temporal patterns of past wildland fires.
Introduction
Information on recent wildland fires comes from documentary records and satellite observations that span years to decades. On longer time scales, fire history is reconstructed from tree rings, including fire scars and the origin dates of postfire cohorts of trees, and sedimentary deposits of charcoal in lakes and wetlands; these reconstructions span centuries to millennia. Historical fire records are useful for understanding interactions among fire, climate, and vegetation and the influence of fire on long-term ecosystem dynamics.
Fire History from Documentary Records
Documentary records are recent time series of fire activity that include the date and location of points at which fires have ignited (e.g., Short 2015) and/or the mapped perimeters of fires (e.g., Morgan et al. 2014). The temporal resolution of these records varies from days to years, and the spatial resolution...
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Heyerdahl, E.K., Whitlock, C., McWethy, D.B. (2019). Fire History. In: Manzello, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Wildfires and Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) Fires. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51727-8_113-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51727-8_113-1
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