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Fire history of the Snowy Range, WY over the past ...

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Fire history of the Snowy Range, WY over the past 16,000 years

Name:Personal
Shriver, Robert Role :Text(marcrelator)
creator

Name:Personal
Minckley, Dr. Tom Role :Text(marcrelator)
contributor

typeOfResource
still image genre
Origin Information Place
Laramie, Wyoming
University of Wyoming (keyDate="yes")
2009-05-18

Language:Text
eng

Physical Description

born digtal

abstract
Fire plays an important role as a disturbance mechanism in forest ecosystems of the Rocky Mountains. While tree ring analysis provides useful insight into historic fire frequency, these analyses are limited by the age of trees. In contrast, macroscopic charcoal deposited in lake sediments, can serve as a proxy for determining the role of fire and fire frequency over large time scales. In addition, this method encompasses a larger range of vegetation and climate variability, dating back to the formation of the lake. This temporal depth can therefore provide insight into changes in fire-climatevegetation relationships. Our study explored natural range of variability of fire in the Snowy Range, WY over the past 16,000 years, based on a lake sediment core taken from Little Windy Hill Lake. Results show infrequent fire activity from 16,000 to 12,000 cal yr BP, when high elevation steppe conditions existed. From12,000 to 8,000 cal yr BP, fire frequency increase but was variable (~2-4/ 1000 yrs) as forest conditions established. During the period between 8,000 and 2,000 cal yr BP, fire frequency stabilizes around ~4/1000 yrs and present day forest vegetation establishes. For the past 2000 years there were no significant fires in the record. note
From - Undergraduate Research Day 2009 - Celebration of Research - Abstracts
Subject
Fire history

Subject
Snowy Range

Subject
lake sediment core analysis

Subject
Wyoming

Related Item:series Title Information
Undergrauate Research Day 2009

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accessCondition:useAndReproduction
http://digital.uwyo.edu/copyright.htm
Record Information languageOfCataloging :Text(ISO639-2B)
English :Code(ISO639-2B)
eng