[M-IS01] Environmental, Socio-Economic and Climatic Changes in Northern Eurasia

[MIS01-09] Wildfire activity of past millennia in Central Yakutia, Siberia, reconstructed with multiple new sedimentary records of charcoal and BPCAs

★Invited Papers

*Ramesh Glueckler^1,2, Shiro Tsuyuzaki¹, Youhei Yamashita¹, Elisabeth Dietze³, Stefan Kruse², Evgenii S. Zakharov^4,5, Aital Egorov⁵, Izabella Baisheva^2,5, Amelie Stieg², Iris Eder², Kathleen Stoof-Leichsenring², Luidmila A. Pestryakova⁵, Ulrike Herzschuh^2,6,7 (1.Faculty of Environmental Earth Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, 2.Polar Terrestrial Environmental Systems, Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Potsdam, Germany, 3.Institute of Geography, Georg-August-University Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany, 4.Institute for Biological Problems of Cryolithozone, Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, Yakutsk, Russia, 5.Institute of Natural Sciences, North-Eastern Federal University of Yakutsk, Yakutsk, Russia, 6.Institute for Environmental Science and Geography, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany, 7.Institute for Biochemistry and Biology, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany)

Keywords:Fire, Reconstruction, Larch, Boreal, Forest, Lake

Boreal eastern Siberia represents unique environments, characterized by complex interactions of climatic extremes, forest vegetation dynamics, permafrost, and human livelihoods. Wildfires are the most important natural disturbance here, shaping the larch-dominated forests. However, recent years have seen extreme wildfire seasons, with vast areas burned in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Siberia’s largest administrative unit. With projections pointing towards a continued intensification of wildfire seasons, this raises questions concerning a safe human operating space, permafrost stability, and larch forest resilience when faced with long-term fire regime changes. Despite recent advances, eastern Siberia is still poorly covered by studies of long-term fire activity and fire regime changes, severely limiting the ability to find answers to those questions.
Here, we present proceedings with a new paleoecological dataset on wildfire activity throughout the past five millennia in Central Yakutia, obtained from multiple lake sediment cores. The reconstructions are based on sedimentary macroscopic charcoal and, for the first time in this region, expanded by extraction and measurement of BPCAs (benzene polycarboxylic acids) for the purpose of estimating fire intensity changes. Study sites are spread across c. 700 km from Yakutsk to Oymyakon and feature a variety of lake settings, from thermokarst to glacial lakes, remote to urban locations, and low to high elevation. The use of BPCAs allows a comparison to the more traditional charcoal fire proxy, while estimations of fire intensity can complement reconstructed biomass burning from charcoal. All data will be made publicly available for use in global synthesis studies, where, until now, eastern Siberia was strongly underrepresented.