From the Conclusion ... 'Regional synchroly of ecological procss is the hallmark of climatic influence and is an emergent property evident in fire occurrence time series aggregated over regions to continents (e.g., Swetnam and Betancourt 1998; Kitzberger, Swetnam, and Veblen 2001). Although fire history is often a function of site-specific environmental and cultural variables, it is clear that with network approaches, involving massive replication of high-resolution fire-scar time series across multiple points in space, it is possible to reconstruct very useful proxies of ecologically effective climatic change. The synchrony of fire regime variations in different regions can be compared and contrasted to elucidate historical climatic and cultural events and vaariations.... The changing and variable nature of these inverse patterns should be thoroughly assessed using combinations of twentieth-century climate and fire occurrence data (fire atlases) and tree-ring based fire histories (Morgan et al. 2001). Direct comparisons between existing fire atlases and broadscale networks of fire histories will be one way to do this, but development of more extensive networks is needed, especially in regions where relatively few crossdated fire-scar chronologies have been developed, such as in southwest Canada and the Pacific Northwest, northern Rockies, Great Basin, and northern Mexico.' © 2003 springer-Verlag, Inc. All rights reserved.