Long-term disturbance histories, reconstructed using diverse paleoecological tools, provide high-quality information about pre-observational periods. These data offer a portrait of past environmental variability for understanding the long-term patterns in climate and disturbance regimes and the forest ecosystem response to these changes. Paleoenvironmental records also provide a longer-term context against which current anthropogenic-related environmental changes can be evaluated. Records of the long-term interactions between disturbances, vegetation, and climate help guide forest management practices that aim to mirror “natural” disturbance regimes. In this chapter, we outline how paleoecologists obtain these long-term data sets and extract paleoenvironmental information from a range of sources. We demonstrate how the reconstruction of key disturbances in the boreal forest, such as fire and insect outbreaks, provides critical long-term views of disturbance-climate-vegetation interactions. Recent developments of novel proxies are highlighted to illustrate advances in reconstructing millennial-scale disturbance-related dynamics and how this new information benefits the sustainable management of boreal forests in a rapidly changing climate.
CITATION STYLE
Aakala, T., Remy, C. C., Arseneault, D., Morin, H., Girardin, M. P., Gennaretti, F., … Girona, M. M. (2023). Millennial-Scale Disturbance History of the Boreal Zone. In Advances in Global Change Research (Vol. 74, pp. 53–87). Springer Science and Business Media B.V. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15988-6_2
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