Fire History in the Qinling Mountains of East‐Central China Since the Last Glacial Maximum

Abstract

Fire is an important component of ecosystem functioning and is closely related to climate, vegetation and biochemical cycles (Nolan et al., 2020;Pechony & Shindell, 2010). Fire frequency and intensity have increased with human-induced global warming in forested landscapes in recent years (Carter et al., 2018;Parks & Abatzoglou, 2020). Li et al. (2017) suggested fire-induced changes in terrestrial ecosystems have significantly increased the global average land surface temperature by 0.18°C in the 20th century. Mitigating the warming climate heavily depends on carbon storage in forests (Grassi et al., 2017;Yu et al., 2022). However, fire is the key disturbance factor in forest cover (Flannigan et al., 2009;Wu et al., 2014) and high-intensity fires usually occur in forested regions and transform forest communities from "carbon sinks" into "carbon sources" (Huang et al., 2020;Ying et al., 2018). The GFED3 model showed that CO 2 generated from deforestation fires accounts for about one third of the total CO 2 flux (Prentice et al., 2011). The fire mechanisms include a combination of factors operating on a range of timescales. The short observational period is not sufficient to fully capture the overall factors of fires occurrence in a region, it is thus crucial to study fire history at the longer time scales. This information can then provide detailed understanding on aspects of warming induced fire in the past, the balance of fuel source versus climate forcing, and the influence of anthropogenic activities on fires in forested regions.The Qinling Mountains are dominated by forest cover and are close to the boundary where subtropical vegetation in the south alternates with temperate vegetation in the north, making the mountains an important ecological zone in China (Yao et al., 2020). Frequent fire events have been recorded in recent decades, which influenced the