Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Creating A Comprehensive Western American/Canadian Fire Dataset, 1880-2018, Katherine Welch

WWU Graduate School Collection

The currently available fire-history data of Western North America (US/Canada) available for geographic and other analyses is largely piecemeal and difficult to find. Data from before the 1980s is scattered among many sources and held by a plethora of different agencies. The aim of this project was to change that daunting reality and provide a single dataset that would fill that data gap and make doing research on and mapping of fires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries more accessible.

This data encompasses 138 years (1880 - 2018), 12 US states, three Canadian provinces and two Canadian territories. …

Holocene Fire History Reconstruction Of A Mid-Evaluation Mixed-Conifer Forest In The Eastern Cascades, Washington, Zoe Rushton

All Master's Theses

Fire histories of mid-elevation mixed-conifer forests (MEMC) are uncommon, particularly in the eastern Cascades of Washington. As a result, fire regimes and the effects of 20th century fire suppression in these forests are not well understood. In the summer of 2014 a 7.80 meter-long sediment core was extracted from Long Lake, located approximately 45 km west of Yakima, WA, which exists in a grand fir-dominated mixed-conifer forest. Fire activity for the Long Lake watershed was reconstructed using macroscopic charcoal analysis and pollen analysis was used to reconstruct vegetation change through time. Charcoal results show low fire activity in the early …

Fire History Of The Appalachian Region: A Review And Synthesis, Charles W. Lafon, Adam T. Naito, Henri D. Grissino-Mayer, Sally P Horn, Thomas A. Waldrop

Geography Publications and Other Works

The importance of fire in shaping Appalachian vegetation has become increasingly apparent over the last 25 years. This period has seen declines in oak (Quercus) and pine (Pinus) forests and other fire-dependent ecosystems, which in the near-exclusion of fire are being replaced by fire-sensitive mesophytic vegetation. These vegetation changes imply that Appalachian vegetation had developed under a history of burning before the fire-exclusion era, a possibility that has motivated investigations of Appalachian fire history using proxy evidence. Here we synthesize those investigations to obtain an up-to-date portrayal of Appalachian fire history. We organize the report by …

Incendios En Los Pinares De Las Zonas Montañosas De La República Dominicana: La Visión De Fondo, Sally P Horn

Geography Publications and Other Works

Fire in Highland Pine Forests of the Dominican Republic―The Long View

Large forest fires in Valle Nuevo National Park in 2014 and 2015 have increased interest in fire as an ecological force in montane pine forests of the Dominican Republic. Geographer Dr. José Ramón Martínez Batlle estimated using Landsat imagery and GIS that some 4700 ha burned in July 2014 (http://www.geografiafisica.org/2014/07/29/superficie-quemada-incendio-valle-nuevo/), and an additional 1600 ha burned in late April 2015 (http://www.geografiafisica.org/2015/09/25/superficie-quemada-en-valle-nuevo-finales-de-abril-principios-de-mayo-2015/).

Since 1995, when I first visited what is today Valle Nuevo National Park (then, Valle Nuevo Scientific Reserve), as a guest of the Moscoso …

Fire And Forest History From Soil Charcoal In Yellow Pine And Mixed Hardwood-Pine Forests In The Southern Appalachian Mountains, U.S.A., Christopher Aaron Underwood

Doctoral Dissertations

The Holocene history and ecological role of fire in forested ecosystems in the southern Appalachians is incompletely known. Determining how often and when fire has affected forest communities requires us to think about fire over time scales that extend beyond those of written fire records. This research is the first to specifically address the spatio-temporal patterns of forest fires in southern Appalachian xeric forests using radiocarbon dating of taxonomically identified soil charcoal as the primary proxy. Forty-eight soil cores were recovered in eight sites established for a companion study of dendrochronological evidence of fire history. The eight sites were located …

A Vegetation History From Emerald Pond, Great Abaco Island, The Bahamas, Based On Pollen Analysis, Ian Arthur Slayton

Masters Theses

Emerald Pond (26° 32' 12" N, 77° 06' 32" W) is a vertical-walled solution hole in the pine rocklands of Great Abaco Island, The Bahamas. In 2006, Sally Horn, Ken Orvis, and students recovered an 8.7 m-long sediment core from the center of the pond using a Colinvaux-Vohnout locking piston corer. AMS radiocarbon dates on macrofossils are in stratigraphic order and indicate that the sequence extends to ca. 8400 cal yr BP. Basal deposits consist of aeolian sands topped by a soil and then pond sediment, suggesting that the site began as a sheltered, dry hole during a Late Pleistocene …

Registros De Sedimentos Lacustres De La Vegetación Del Holoceno Y Historia Del Fuego En El Páramo De Costa Rica. (Lake-Sediment Records Of Holocene Vegetation And Fire History In The Costa Rican Páramos), Sally P Horn, Brandon L. League

Geography Publications and Other Works

We examined pollen, pteridophyte (ferns and fern-allies) spores, and charcoal in a 5.6 m long sediment core from Lago de las Morrenas 1, and charcoal in a 1.1 m long sediment core from Lago Chirripó, to reconstruct postglacial vegetation and fire history in the Chirripó páramo. Lago de las Morrenas 1, the largest lake in the Valle de las Morrenas of Chirripó National Park, is presently surrounded by treeless páramo vegetation and has apparently been so since deglaciation approximately 10,000 radiocarbon years ago. Pollen spectra suggest no pronounced changes in vegetation since ice retreat. Pollen percentages for Gramineae and other …