The charcoal record in peat and mineral soil across a boreal landscape and possible linkages to climate change and recent fire history

This study combines tree-ring and charcoal data to explore possible drivers of the charcoal record and its spatial variation in a boreal Norwegian forest landscape. Peat and mineral soil samples were collected in a multiple site sampling approach and the amount of charcoal in the peat is related to fire history, Holocene climate variation, major shifts in the vegetation composition, and fuel availability. Dendrochronologic dating was used to reveal the fire history over the last 600 years with spatial and temporal accuracy, and AMS radiocarbon dating of 20 peat columns and their charcoal records from four peatlands was used to elucidate the fire history over the Holocene. The average amount of charcoal was about 2.5 times higher in the mineral soil than in the peat (270 versus 100 g/m2, respectively), and there were considerable between- and within-site variations. There was no relationship between the age of a given peatland and its content of charcoal, nor between the amount of charcoal in a given peatl...