Resource Catalog
Document
From the text...'Fossil charcoal and pollen records from five sediment cores were used to reconstruct the post-glacial fire and vegetation history on southern Vancouver Island. Specifically, macroscopic charcoal fragments representative of local fire activity were used to reconstruct the post-glacial fire intervals (Whitlock and Millspaugh 1996). Studies such as this are important because they provide insight to the projected changes in distribution, composition, and fire activity of future forests under a global warming climatic scenario (Hebda 1997, 1998)....Fossil charcoal and pollen collected from several sites around southern Vancouver Island show that vegetation composition and fire activity have varied considerably during the late Pleistocene and Holocene. Our results reveal that natural disturbance regimes of coastal forests were strongly shaped by climate, vegetation composition, and possibly human activity. Future forest disturbance and successional patterns may differ considerably from those of the recent past and become more comparable to those of the early Holocene Xerothermic or pyrothermic as the global warming trend progresses.'
Cataloging Information
- Abies spp.
- Alnus
- British Columbia
- Canada
- charcoal
- climate change
- coastal forests
- distribution
- disturbance
- forest types
- fossils
- histories
- paleoecology
- Picea
- Pinus contorta
- pollen
- prehistoric fires
- Tsuga heterophylla
- Tsuga mertensiana
This bibliographic record was either created or modified by Tall Timbers and is provided without charge to promote research and education in Fire Ecology. The E.V. Komarek Fire Ecology Database is the intellectual property of Tall Timbers.