[M-IS01] Environmental, socio-economic, and climatic changes in Northern Eurasia

[MIS01-12] Wildfires in boreal eastern Siberia: Reconstructing the past to predict the future

*Ramesh Glueckler¹, Stefan Kruse°¹, Ulrike Herzschuh^1,2,3, Elisabeth Dietze°¹ (1.Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Potsdam, Germany , 2.Institute for Environmental Science and Geography, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany, 3.Institute for Biochemistry and Biology, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany)

Keywords:boreal, forest, siberia, yakutia, wildfire, larch

Recent extreme fire seasons in many parts of the world have raised concern: How will wildfire activity change with a warming climate? And which consequences could this in turn bring to the environment and to society? The boreal forest of Siberia, where wildfires are a key ecological disturbance, experiences rapidly rising temperatures. This affects vegetation dynamics, permafrost stability and the predominant fire regimes. However, due to a lack of long-term data, the relationships between these processes yet remain to be fully understood. With the aim of improving predictions about impacts of future fire regimes in Siberia, this highlights the need for (I) new long-term paleoenvironmental fire reconstructions to assess the impacts of past fire regime changes and (II) a fire-vegetation model capable of reproducing observed and reconstructed fire activity, so that it can eventually be used to reliably predict future changes.

Here, we present the first results of a project that aims at providing new insights for both of those aspects in eastern Siberia. First, new lake-sedimentary macroscopic charcoal records from south-west Yakutia characterize Holocene fire regime changes in larch-dominated boreal forests. Second, a new fire module for the individual-based, spatially explicit vegetation model LAVESI (Larix Vegetation Simulator) allows for an evaluation of fine-scale fire-weather-vegetation interactions. The newly available fire reconstructions are a promising opportunity to help inform the model. Ongoing research will be continuing to add data from more sites, as well as looking into ways in which proxy-based fire characterization could be improved. A combination of paleoenvironmental reconstructions and the fire-vegetation model can serve as an important tool in order to more reliably evaluate wildfire risks and impacts in eastern Siberia.

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