A new North American fire scar network for reconstructing historical pyrogeography, 1600-1900 AD

The Fire and Climate Synthesis (FACS) project is a collaboration of about 50 fire ecologists to compile and synthesize fire and climate data for western North America. We have compiled nearly 900 multi-century fire-scar based fire histories from the western United States, Canada, and Mexico. The resulting tree-ring based fire history is the largest and most spatially extensive in the world, consisting of annually crossdated fire records for more than 3,000 years (1248 BC -2011 AD) and representing more than 15,000 site-year fire records. State space analysis indicates that the fire history network represents the full climatic range of annual temperature and precipitation conditions in seven widespread forest types in western North America. Large-scale fire occurrence patterns indicate years in which teleconnections of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and other climate oscillatory modes regulate regionally synchronous high and low fire occurrence years through expression of regional drought (wet) conditions.