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Speaker: Dr. Richard Vachula of College of William & Mary
Title: "Climate and human management as competing controls of fire in California's Sierra Nevada"
Abstract: Recent fires and fire seasons in California highlight the need to understand the controls of fire and our ability to manage it. Increasingly, public debate has centered on the relative influence of management and climate as controls of fire, with high-profile politicians chiming in with conflicting, and sometimes non-scientifically-based perspectives. Additionally, Native American fire management techniques have been invoked as a potential means of mitigating fire severity. Notably, this public debate mirrors one pervasive in scientific discourse. In this talk, we will focus on the Sierra Nevada of California, an actively managed area with a rich history of Native American fire use. Using a lake sediment record spanning the last 1400 years, we will reconstruct local and regional fire history to dissect fire-climate relationships and the long-term effectiveness of human fire management. Additionally, this record will provide paleoenvironmental context for modern and historical fire activity in this region.