Seminar Abstract
Jeremy Littell - Tuesday, May 20
Climate Variability and Fire in the Mountain West: Pacific Teleconnections, Drought, and Severe Fire Years since 1600
Fire regime is a term used by ecologists to describe the characteristic
frequency, severity, and size of fire events in a particular ecosystem.
The suite of drivers on fire events are complex, resulting in low explanatory
power for any single driving variable. Since twentieth-century relationships
are confounded by the possibility that fire exclusion is/was effective,
past climate influences on fire provide a better context for exploring
the physical processes linking climate and fire. Aside from landmark
studies relating Southwestern fire regimes to the Southern Oscillation,
relatively little research has sought to establish the spatiotemporal
context of the impacts of Pacific basin oscillations (Pacific Decadal
Oscillation, Southern Oscillation) on fire regimes in the west.
Establishing
such relationships increases skill in forecasting fire seasons, but also
provides a mechanistic context for constructing hypotheses for the effects
of climate change on fire regime. By linking tree-ring based fire histories
with independent reconstructions of drought, the PDO, and the SO, the
magnitude, correlations, and stationarity of these drivers on fire regime
can be evaluated. In this talk, I focus on research linking the Pacific
Decadal Oscillation to fire events in Greater Yellowstone between 1600
and 1900. I will also describe ongoing larger scale work relating the
PDO and SO to past fire regimes in the Pacific Northwest, Northern Rockies,
California and the Southwest