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1. Resilience and sensitivity of ecosystem carbon stocks to fire-regime change in Alaskan tundra

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.151482  

   Chen, Yaping; Kelly, Ryan; Genet, Hélène; Lara, Mark Jason; Chipman, Melissa Lynn; McGuire, A. David; Hu, Feng Sheng (February 2022, Science of The Total Environment)
2. 50-year fire legacy regulates soil microbial carbon and nutrient cycling responses to new fire

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soilbio.2025.109868  

   Revillini, Daniel; Searcy, Christopher A; Afkhami, Michelle E (September 2025, Soil Biology and Biochemistry)
3. Reconciling carbon‐cycle processes from ecosystem to global scales

   https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2296  

   Ballantyne, Ashley P; Liu, Zhihua; Anderegg, William RL; Yu, Zicheng; Stoy, Paul; Poulter, Ben; Vanderwall, Joseph; Watts, Jennifer; Kelsey, Kathy; Neff, Jason (February 2021, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment)

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4. Century-Scale Fire Dynamics in a Savanna Ecosystem.

   Leys, Bérangère A.; Griffin, Daniel; Larson, Evan R.; McLauchlan, Kendra K. (September 2019, Fire)

   (1) Background: Frequent fire, climate variability, and human activities collectively influence savanna ecosystems. The relative role of these three factors likely varies on interannual, decadal, and centennial timescales. Here, we tested if Euro-American activities uncoupled drought and fire frequencies relative to previous centuries in a temperate savanna site. (2) Methods: We combined records of fire frequency from tree ring fire scars and sediment charcoal abundance, and a record of fuel type based on charcoal particle morphometry to reconstruct centennial scale shifts in fire frequency and fuel sources in a savanna ecosystem. We also tested the climate influence on fire occurrence with an independently derived tree-ring reconstruction of drought. We contextualized these data with historical records of human activity. (3) Results: Tree fire scars revealed eight fire events from 1822–1924 CE, followed by localized suppression. Charcoal signals highlight 13 fire episodes from 1696–2001. Fire–climate coupling was not clearly evident both before and after Euro American settlement The dominant fuel source shifted from herbaceous to woody fuel during the early-mid 20th century. (4) Conclusions: Euro-American settlement and landscape fragmentation disrupted the pre-settlement fire regime (fire frequency and fuel sources). Our results highlight the potential for improved insight by synthesizing interpretation of multiple paleofire proxies, especially in fire regimes with mixed fuel sources. 

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5. Fire-regime variability impacts forest carbon dynamics for centuries to millennia

   https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-14-3873-2017  

   Hudiburg, Tara W.; Higuera, Philip E.; Hicke, Jeffrey A. (January 2017, Biogeosciences)

   Abstract. Wildfire is a dominant disturbance agent in forest ecosystems, shaping important biogeochemical processes including net carbon (C) balance. Long-term monitoring and chronosequence studies highlight a resilience of biogeochemical properties to large, stand-replacing, high-severity fire events. In contrast, the consequences of repeated fires or temporal variability in a fire regime (e.g., the characteristic timing or severity of fire) are largely unknown, yet theory suggests that such variability could strongly influence forest C trajectories (i.e., future states or directions) for millennia. Here we combine a 4500-year paleoecological record of fire activity with ecosystem modeling to investigate how fire-regime variability impacts soil C and net ecosystem carbon balance. We found that C trajectories in a paleo-informed scenario differed significantly from an equilibrium scenario (with a constant fire return interval), largely due to variability in the timing and severity of past fires. Paleo-informed scenarios contained multi-century periods of positive and negative net ecosystem C balance, with magnitudes significantly larger than observed under the equilibrium scenario. Further, this variability created legacies in soil C trajectories that lasted for millennia. Our results imply that fire-regime variability is a major driver of C trajectories in stand-replacing fire regimes. Predicting carbon balance in these systems, therefore, will depend strongly on the ability of ecosystem models to represent a realistic range of fire-regime variability over the past several centuries to millennia. 

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