Regional variability in peatland burning at mid-to high-latitudes during the Holocene
Valiranta, Minna
Anderson, Lysanna
Apolinarska, Karina
Augustijns, Femke
Aunina, Liene
Bobek, Premysl
Borken, Werner
Broothaerts, Nils
Cui, Qiao-Yu
Davies, Marissa A.
Ejarque, Ana
Farrell, Michelle
Feeser, Ingo
Feurdean, Angelica
Finkelstein, Sarah A.
Gaika, Mariusz
Heffernan, Liam
Hoevers, Renske
Jones, Miriam
Juselius-Rajamaki, Teemu
Karofeld, Edgar
Knorr, Klaus-Holger
Korhola, Atte
Kupriyanov, Dmitri
Kylander, Malin E.
Lacourse, Terri
Lamentowicz, Mariusz
Lavoie, Martin
Lemdahl, Geoffrey
Lucow, Dominika
Maksims, Alekss
Marcisz, Katarzyna
Marinova, Elena
Mathijssen, Paul J. H.
Mauquoy, Dmitri
Mazei, Yuri A.
Mazei, Natalia
McCarroll, Julia
McCulloch, Robert D.
Milner, Alice M.
Miras, Yannick
Mitchell, Fraser J. G.
Novenko, Elena
Pelletier, Nicolas
Peros, Matthew C.
Piilo, Sanna R.
Rius, Damien
Robin, Vincent
Ryberg, Eleonor
Sannel, A. Britta K.
Schittek, Karsten
Servera-Vives, Gabriel
Shotyk, William
Slowinski, Michal
Stivrins, Normunds
Swinnen, Ward
Tiunov, Alexei
Tsyganov, Andrey N.
Tuittila, Eeva-Stiina
Verstraeten, Gert
Wallenius, Tuomo
Webb, Julia
Willard, Debra
Yu, Zicheng
Zaccone, Claudio
Zhang, Hui
- 1University of Leeds
- 2Queens University Belfast
- 3University of Exeter
- 4Bowdoin College
- 5Geotop Univ Quebec Montreal
- 6University of Portsmouth
- 7Texas A&M University System
- 8University of Queensland
- 9
Journal
Quaternary Science Reviews
ISSN
0277-3791
1873-457X
Open Access
hybrid
Volume
305
Northern peatlands store globally-important amounts of carbon in the form of partly decomposed plant detritus. Drying associated with climate and land-use change may lead to increased fire frequency and severity in peatlands and the rapid loss of carbon to the atmosphere. However, our understanding of the patterns and drivers of peatland burning on an appropriate decadal to millennial timescale relies heavily on individual site-based reconstructions. For the first time, we synthesise peatland macrocharcoal re-cords from across North America, Europe, and Patagonia to reveal regional variation in peatland burning during the Holocene. We used an existing database of proximal sedimentary charcoal to represent regional burning trends in the wider landscape for each region. Long-term trends in peatland burning appear to be largely climate driven, with human activities likely having an increasing influence in the late Holocene. Warmer conditions during the Holocene Thermal Maximum (similar to 9e6 cal. ka BP) were associated with greater peatland burning in North America's Atlantic coast, southern Scandinavia and the Baltics, and Patagonia. Since the Little Ice Age, peatland burning has declined across North America and in some areas of Europe. This decline is mirrored by a decrease in wider landscape burning in some, but not all sub-regions, linked to fire-suppression policies, and landscape fragmentation caused by agricultural expansion. Peatlands demonstrate lower susceptibility to burning than the wider landscape in several instances, probably because of autogenic processes that maintain high levels of near-surface wetness even during drought. Nonetheless, widespread drying and degradation of peatlands, particularly in Europe, has likely increased their vulnerability to burning in recent centuries. Consequently, peatland restoration efforts are important to mitigate the risk of peatland fire under a changing climate. Finally, we make recommendations for future research to improve our understanding of the controls on peatland fires.(c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).