In this webinar presented by the Southern Blue Ridge FLN, Will Flatley will present work he conducted with Charles Lafon, Henri Grissino-Mayer and Lisa LaForest that characterizes past fire regimes at three sites in the southern Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina.

The objectives were to

1. characterize the historical frequency of fire in southern Appalachian mixed pine-oak forests,
2. assess the impact of interannual climatic variability on the historical occurrence of fire, and
3. determine whether changes in human culture and land use altered the frequency of fire.

The characterization of past fire regimes should provide managers with specific targets for restoration of fire-associated communities in this region. Fire chronologies reported here are among the longest tree-ring reconstructions of fire history compiled for the eastern U.S. and support the hypothesis that frequent burning has played a long and important role in the development of forests in the southern Appalachian Mountains.