Spatiotemporal patterns of fires in Šumava

The project aims to explore new hypotheses concerning Holocene patterns and drivers of fire regime and fire impacts on vegetation in central European beech-spruce forests under a range of past climate and environmental conditions using novel and established sedimentary fossil data sets.

In light of observations of climate changes over the past century, and with projected increases in climate extremes and fire risk in Central Europe, understanding long-term fire-climate- vegetation linkages becomes imperative for predicting the frequency and impacts of fire-related disturbances in central European spruce-beech forests. In this context, the proposed project BOBAFIRES aims to understand spatial-temporal patterns of biomass burning in the Bohemian /Bavarian Forests, Šumava Mountains by disentangling natural from anthropogenic drivers of fire. The project will use a multi-proxy, interdisciplinary approach which integrates novel methods used for quantifying fire regime (macro-charcoal, charcoal morphologies and statistical analysis) and climate variables (water-table depth inferred from testate-amoebae, dD based reconstruction of palaeoprecipitation and br-GDGT palaeothermometry), as well as established proxies for the reconstruction of vegetation (pollen and macrofossil analysis) and human impact (non-pollen palynomorphs, archaeological evidence).

Team:

Gabriela Florescu

Vachel Carter

Alice Moravcová