Macrocharcoal Signals in Histosols Reveal Wildfire History of Vast Western Siberian Forest-Peatland Complexes

• Published in: Plants
• Main Authors: Viktor Startsev, Nikolay Gorbach, Anton Mazur, Anatoly Prokushkin, Lyudmila Karpenko, Alexey Dymov
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2022
• Subjects: boreal forest; charcoal; climate changing; peat soil; wildfires; 13 C-NMR; Botany; QK1-989; taiga; Siberia
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/plants11243478; https://doaj.org/article/37f529484c98442cbb1a36ad5b3f89df

Fires are a naturally cyclical factor regulating ecosystems’ function and forming new postfire ecosystems. Peat soils are unique archives that store information about ecological and climatic changes and the history of past fires during the Holocene. The paper presents a reconstruction of the dynamics of fires in the subzone of the middle taiga of Western Siberia in the Holocene. Data on fires were obtained based on the results of a study of the content of macroscopic coal particles and radiocarbon dating. The effect of fires on soil organic matter (SOM) was estimated using 13 C NMR spectroscopy and the content of polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). It is shown that throughout the Holocene, the peatlands studied were prone to fires. The conducted analyses show that the maximum content of charcoal particles is observed in the Atlantic (~9100–5800 cal. B.P.) and Subatlantic (~3100 cal. B.P. to the present) periods. The high correlation dependence of the content of coals with the content of PAHs (r = 0.56, p < 0.05) and aromatic structures of SOM (r = 0.61, p < 0.05) in peat horizons is shown, which can characterize these parameters as a reliable marker of pyrogenesis.