Fire as a key driver for long term ecosystem structure, functioning and biodiversity in central-eastern Europe.

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In Central Eastern (CE) Europe, fire size and severity is anticipated to increase in the coming decades as a response to warmer and drier summers with a longer fire season and biomass accumulation following agriculture abandonment. This raises concerns about the future trajectory of fire regimes and post-fire vegetation dynamics. The aim of this project is twofold, one is to understand fire regime dynamics under a range of past environmental conditions and anthropogenic land use schemes throughout new, high-resolution macro-charcoal records from vegetation sensitive to fire from this region: temperate coniferous mountain forests, boreal forests and temperate grasslands. The other is to provide the research community with a critical synthesis of charcoal records spanning CE Europe, a "white spot" in terms of the spatial coverage and high-resolution charcoal records. These charcoal records will be evaluated in combination with other proxy- and modelled data sets of past climate, vegetation, land cover and land use, to facilitate a critical examination of the patterns, drivers and consequences of biomass burning over multiple spatial and temporal scales. The methodology includes sampling and analyses of micro and macro-charcoal, charred remains, molecular fire markers, fossil pollen, mineral magnetic properties, establishment of age chronologies in conjunction with archaeological data and available reconstructed and modelled climate conditions and LPJ-GUESS vegetation model. This proposal addresses highly relevant questions with respect to the ecological effect of fire on temperate grasslands and boreal and temperate forests in Europe. It also aims to close important knowledge gaps with respect to long-term interaction and feedback mechanisms between fire, climate, vegetation, and anthropogenic impact in the past. This is a vital prerequisite for a better understanding of processes that cannot be observed directly at present day, but which need to be taken into account when defining optimal fire frequencies under a range of environmental conditions and anthropogenic land use schemes to maintain ecosystem functioning and biodiversity.