Abundance and δ13C of sedimentary black carbon indicate rising wildfire and C4 plants in Northeast China during the early Holocene
Introduction
Massive forest fires are raging around the world, including the most recent California wildfires in 2018 and 2020, Amazon rainforest fires in 2019, and Australian forest fires that lasted by several months in 2019 (Nolan et al., 2020; Yu et al., 2020). Intensive, large-scale fires lead to life loss and economic damages, as well as posing a significant threat to the ecosystem and biodiversity. Global warming is thought to be the primary cause for forest fires (Coogan et al., 2019; Running, 2006) for leading to warm and dry conditions that are conducive to biomass burning (Zhou, 2005). Human activities also contribute to rising forest fires for increasing the frequency of ignition (Marlon et al., 2013). However, the extent and frequency of forest fires show large spatiotemporal variability that suggests the importance of regional environmental drivers (Marlon et al., 2013), and identifying these drivers requires a robust understanding of evolving fire-vegetation-climate dynamics through geological spans of time.
Black carbon (BC) produced from biomass burning and fossil fuel combustion contains a wide range of carbon-rich compounds (Bird and Ascough, 2012; Masiello and Druffel, 1998). BC is also known as biochar, charcoal, pyrogenic carbon and soot (Bird and Ascough, 2012). Due to the recalcitrant nature to chemical and microbial alterations (Masiello and Druffel, 1998; Schmidt and Noack, 2000), BC is usually well preserved in peats, soil, and lacustrine and marine sediments, and therefore has been regarded as a reliable proxy for reconstructing fire history (Bird and Cali, 1998; Zhou et al., 2007, Zhou et al., 2014, Zhou et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2013; Sun, 2016). The concentrations of BC in sediments are overall positively correlated to fire frequencies, and stable carbon isotopic compositions of BC (δ13CBC) can indicate the type of vegetation contributing to the fire (Bird and Gröcke, 1997; Jia et al., 2003; Zhou et al., 2009, Zhou et al., 2014, Zhou et al., 2017; Sun et al., 2015, Sun et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2015). The δ13C values of biomass undergo a fractionation of −1.6–0‰ during combustion (Bird and Gröcke, 1997), but they do not exhibit significant fractionations after burial (Bird and Gröcke, 1997; Bird and Ascough, 2012; Liu et al., 2013; Sun et al., 2018). The application of sedimentary BC and δ13CBC allows reconstructing past changes in fire, vegetation, and climate, as well as their spatiotemporal coupling at different scales.
Northeastern (NE) China supports some of the most diverse forest ecosystems in northern Asia, and it is one of the highest-fire-risk areas in Asia, with more than 1100 forest fires reported in Heilongjiang province from 2002 to 2017 (Zhang et al., 2018). Situated at the boundary between East Asian summer monsoon and Westerlies, fire and vegetation of NE China are sensitive recorders of climate and environmental changes (Tan, 2019). However, long-term geological records of forest fire and vegetation in this area were established only in a low-resolution chronological framework (e.g., Li et al., 2003; Sun et al., 2018; Wu, 2009), and/or derived mainly from low-lying lake basin deposits whose paleoenvironmental interpretations are often subject to ambiguity due to complex sedimentary sources and post-burial human disturbance (e.g., Li et al., 2005; Li et al., 2012; Sun et al., 2018).
The present study sought to reconstruct a relatively high-resolution fire and vegetation evolution history over ~34,000 cal yr BP in NE China using sediments from a high-elevation crater lake. Crater lakes are considered to be excellent paleoenvironmental archives because they are usually hydrologically isolated (with little inflow or outflow) and thus create a stable sedimentary environment with relatively simple exogenous sedimentary sources (Liu et al., 2010; Liu et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2019; Zhou et al., 2016). Furthermore, they usually have a high elevation and thus relatively are less disturbed by anthropogenic sources and activities (Liu et al., 2019). Here, we establish a complete record of fire history of NE China since the late Last Glacial (after ~34,000 cal yr BP) using BC and δ13CBC of sediments from the Tianchi Crater Lake. Our results provide new insight into the role of vegetation vs. climate in regulating forest fires at different temporal scales, laying the groundwork to further improve our abilities of managing and predicting fires in mountainous boreal forests.
Section snippets
Study area
The Tianchi Crater Lake located in NE China, is a closed lake free from disturbance from river input and human activities over the past 300 years (Liu et al., 2019). It (126°E, 48°44′N, Fig. 1) has a diameter of 300–400 m and has no inflow or outflow (Liu et al., 2019). The lake has an elevation of 596.9 m (AMSL) and is located at the summit of Nangelaqiu Hill, which is situated at the transition zone between the Great Khingan Range and the Songnen Plain. The mean annual temperature (MAT) of
Results
BC and δ13CBC values from the TCL sequence in Wudalianchi (Fig. 3) show an overall similar temporal trend since the late Last Glacial. Specifically, both proxies exhibit relatively low and stable values during the late Last Glacial, increase significantly since 14,000 cal yr BP, and display evident fluctuations in the Holocene. In the late Last Glacial, BC concentrations and δ13CBC values average 0.40% and −29.0‰, respectively. These values are higher during the Holocene, averaging 0.87% for BC
Fire history of NE China since the late Last Glacial
BC concentration is positively correlated with the extent and frequency of biomass burning (Zhou et al., 2007), with increases in BC in sediments indicating more intensive fires, which may be caused by biomass fuel accumulation and/or a drier climate (Zhou et al., 2007). Our results of BC indicate forest fires in NE China were infrequent and weak from 34,000 cal yr BP to 14,000 cal yr BP and were more active with significant fluctuations during the Last Deglaciation and the Holocene. And a
Conclusions
Through analyzing sedimentary BC and δ13CBC values from a crater lake (Tianchi), the present study established the evolution history of fire and vegetation and identified the primary environmental/climatic drivers in NE China since ~34,000 cal yr BP. We found that fires were scarce during the late Last Glacial but enhanced significantly during the Holocene. Within the Holocene, fires were stronger in the early than in the mid-to-late Holocene. C4 plants were present in the early-to-mid Holocene
Declaration of Competing Interest
We declare that our present submission has no conflict of interest. Both data and results of this paper have not be published or under consideration for publication elsewhere.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Major Research Plan of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grand No. 41991323), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41977378, 41822707), Jiangsu Provincial Basic Research Program Natural Science Foundation General Project of China (BK20171340). Data of BC&δ13C from Tianchi Crater Lake.
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2022, Quaternary Science ReviewsCitation Excerpt :Fire management is an increasingly pressing concern for China as recent published data suggest that ∼3.35 million ha of land have burned per year from 2011 to 2020 in China (Giglio et al., 2018). Recent studies of the fire history in northern and southeast China on the centennial to multi-millennial timescales have mostly focused on investigating paleofire responses to natural and anthropogenic factors, revealing that the fire activity at different sites linked to increasing temperature and biomass, drought, human activities, and the interactions of different controlling factors (e.g., Hao et al., 2020; Pang et al., 2021; Wang et al., 2013; Zhao et al., 2017). By contrast, there are relatively few reconstructions of Holocene fire history from western China, especially for vegetation hotspot regions including southwestern China (Xue et al., 2018; Xu et al., 2021).