An open-source database of historical wildfires in the Fontainebleau Forest

Abstract

Abstract Background Wildfires are one of the main disturbances to vegetation dynamics and the carbon cycle in forest and grassland ecosystems. Wildfires modify the quantity and quality of carbon inputs to the litter and soil. Precise localisation and date of past fires are very useful data in fire studies but historical wildfire archives do not exist for most forests. This lack of data limits our understanding of long-term impacts of wildfires on plant communities and the forest carbon cycle. Results We present the first version of the Fontainebleau Forest Fires Database, an open-source database of geolocalized wildfire events going back four hundred years. It includes, for each of the 43 fires identified from visual and written sources, the date, localisation, and the source of the information. The table is completed by a QGIS polygon layer with the 24 fires for which it was possible to reconstruct the approximate burn perimeter. Conclusion The combination of this database with many other spatialised information available for the area (vegetation, soil, …) offers a unique opportunity to study the long term interplay of fire, human activity and forest ecology and biogeochemistry. This database contains only a fraction of the known fires in the Fontainebleau Forest. It is meant to be expanded collaboratively and via in depth search through the numerous historical archives about the former Royal Forest of Fontainebleau.

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