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Terrestrial biosphere

The burning issue

Nature Geoscience volume 1, pages 643–644 (2008)Cite this article

Wildfires have been a natural part of the Earth system for millions of years. A new charcoal database for the past two millennia shows that human activity increased biomass burning after AD 1750 and suppressed it after AD 1870.

Fires have scorched the Earth's surface for over 400 million years, and have been an integral part of the Earth system for the past 350 million years1,2. But since humans have begun to use and control fire, its significance in many ecosystems has changed3. This connection between humans and fire has often masked our understanding of natural fire, especially the influence of climate change on fire frequency and extent — a topic that is likely to become increasingly important over the coming decades. Today we can try to map fires and their emissions with satellite images4,5, which may help to unravel the relationship between fire and agricultural development. However, the complexity of human use and suppression of fire3 makes it difficult to disentangle any influence of climate on fire from the impacts of humans. On the Nature Geoscience website today, Marlon and colleagues6 compile hundreds of globally distributed charcoal records spanning the past 2,000 years in order to shed light on humans' changing influence on fire.

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Figure 1: Letting fires burn.

Jon Keeley

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  1. Andrew C. Scott is in the Department of Earth Sciences, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK. a.scott@es.rhul.ac.uk,

    Andrew C. Scott

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Scott, A. The burning issue. Nature Geosci 1, 643–644 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo321

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