WCD-17. The North American Tree-Ring Fire Scar Network

Abstract
Envisioning the future of wildland fire across North America requires that we gain insights into the dynamics of historical fire regimes. The newly compiled North American tree-ring fire scar network (NAFSN) consists of >37,000 trees from 2,941 sites that provide annual or sub-annual records of wildland fires covering the last 300-400 years. In this poster, I’ll highlight some of the insights we’re gaining from the immense network, including on historical Indigenous fire management, the scale of the modern fire deficit, changing fire regime characteristics, and other fire-climate relationships. In addition, the CIRES/NCEI paleo team is making the NAFSN publicly-available on the International Multiproxy Paleofire Database, for which we are the data stewards and are building software tools to aid researchers and managers in accessing and exploring the network.