A 1416-year reconstruction of annual, multidecadal, and centennial variability in area burned for ponderosa pine forests of the southern Colorado Plateau region, Southwest USA (original) (raw)

Fire history reconstructions from fire scars in tree rings have been valuable for assessing fire regime changes and their climatic controls. It has been asserted, however, that these two- to four-century long records from the western USA are unrepresentative of longer periods of the Holocene and are of limited use for understanding current or future fire regimes. The Medieval Climate Anomaly (800–1300 ce) is often suggested as a better analog for future Southwestern US climates but is beyond the chronological range of most fire-scar studies in this region. To evaluate fire regime changes over the past millennium, we build on centennial-length fire–climate studies to generate a 1416 year long reconstruction of fire activity in ponderosa pine forests of the Southern Colorado Plateau region of Arizona and New Mexico. We used a split-period calibration and verification protocol to test the reliability of a multiple regression model using annual and antecedent precipitation (reconstructe...