Large-scale modes of climate variability influence forest fire activity and may modulate the future patterns of natural disturbances. We studied the effects of long-term changes in climate upon the fire regime in the red pine forests of eastern North America using (a) a network of sites with dendrochronological reconstructions of fire histories over 1700–1900 A.D., (b) reconstructed chronologies of climate indices (1700–1900), and (c) 20th century observational records of climate indices, local surface climate and fire (1950s-2021). We hypothesized that (H1) there are states of atmospheric circulation that are consistently associated with increased fire activity, (H2) these states mark periods of increased climatological fire hazard, and (H3) the observed decline in fire activity in the 20th century is associated with a long-term decline in the frequency of fire-prone states. At the annual scale, years with significantly higher fire activity in the reconstructed and modern fire records were consistently associated with the positive phases of the Pacific North American pattern (PNA), either independently or in combination with the positive phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation index (ENSO). During years with both ENSO and PNA in their positive state, the region experienced positive mid-tropospheric heights and temperature anomalies resulting in drought conditions. The fire-prone climate states identified in the reconstructed records became less frequent in 1850 but re-emerged in the 20th century. While our study did not demonstrate a direct influence of climate on the observed decrease in fire activity in the 20th century, it does reveal a clear climate signal embedded within the fire history reconstruction of the region over the past centuries. This study underscores the importance of considering large-scale climatic patterns in understanding historical fire regimes and highlights their role for future fire dynamics in the region and shaping ecological effects of future fires.

Sugar maple (Acer saccharum Marshall) growth in the species’ southern range has been declining since the 1980s, putting at risk a variety of ecosystem services that the species provides. Heatwaves, drought, frosts, acidic deposition, and insect defoliation, all reducing photosynthetic activity, have been suggested to be behind the phenomenon. Because the geographic scope of previous studies on maple growth is limited to the southern temperate biome, it is not currently understood whether the same negative trends and factors affecting growth rates apply to the species in more northern regions of its distribution range. Here we used annual ring-width data of 1675 trees from a network of 21 sites in Quebec and Ontario between 45˚N and 48˚N to reconstruct maple growth and to analyze its trends and climatic drivers since 1950 C

Understanding factors driving fire activity helps reveal the degree and geographical variability in the resilience of boreal vegetation to large scale climate forces. We studied the association between sea ice cover in the Baffin Bay and the Labrador Sea and observational records of forest fires in two Nordic countries (Norway and Sweden) over 1913–2017. We found a positive correlation between ice proxies and regional fire activity records suggesting that the Arctic climate and the associated changes in North Atlantic circulation exercise an important control on the levels of fire activity in Scandinavia. Changes in the sea cover are likely correlated with the dynamic of the North Atlantic Current. These dynamics may favor the development of the drought conditions in Scandinavia through promoting persistent high-pressure systems over the Scandinavian boreal zone during the spring and summer. These periods are, in turn, associated with an increased water deficit in forest fuels, leading to a regionally increased fire hazard. The Arctic climate will likely be an important future control of the boreal fire activity in the Nordic region.

Warning: This article contains terms, descriptions, and opinions used for historical context that may be culturally sensitive for some readers.Background: Understanding drivers of boreal forest dynamics supports adaptation strategies in the context of climate change.Aims: We aimed to understand how burn rates varied since the early 1700s in North American boreal forests.Methods: We used 16 fire-history study sites distributed across such forests and investigated variation in burn rates for the historical period spanning 1700-1990. These were benchmarked against recent burn rates estimated for the modern period spanning 1980-2020 using various data sources.Key results: Burn rates during the historical period for most sites showed a declining trend, particularly during the early to mid 1900s. Compared to the historical period, the modern period showed less variable and lower burn rates across sites. Mean burn rates during the modern period presented divergent trends among eastern versus northwestern sites, with increasing trends in mean burn rates in most northwestern North American sites.Conclusions: The synchronicity of trends suggests that large spatial patterns of atmospheric conditions drove burn rates in addition to regional changes in land use like fire exclusion and suppression.Implications: Low burn rates in eastern Canadian boreal forests may continue unless climate change overrides the capacity to suppress fire.

Understanding long-term forest fire histories of boreal landscapes is instrumental for parameterizing climate–fire interactions and the role of humans affecting natural fire regimes. The eastern sections of the European boreal zone currently lack a network of annually resolved and centuries-long forest fire histories. To fill in this knowledge gap, we dendrochronologically reconstructed the 600-year fire history of a middle boreal pine-dominated landscape of the southern part of the Republic of Komi, Russia. We combined the reconstruction of fire cycle (FC) and fire occurrence with the data on the village establishment and climate proxies and discussed the relative contribution of climate versus human land use in shaping historic fire regimes. Over the 1340–1610 ce period, the territory had a FC of 66 years (with the 90% confidence envelope of 56.8 and 78.6 years). Fire activity increased during the 1620–1730 ce period, with the FC reaching 32 years (31.0–34.7 years). Between 1740–1950, the FC increased to 47 years (41.9–52.0). The most recent period, 1960–2010, marks FC's historic maximum, with the mean of 153 years (102.5–270.3). Establishment of the villages, often as small harbors on the Pechora River, was associated with a non-significant increase in fire occurrence in the sites nearest the villages (p = 0.07–0.20). We, however, observed a temporal association between village establishment and fire occurrence at the scale of the whole studied landscape. There was no positive association between the former and the FC. In fact, we documented a decline in the area burned, following the wave of village establishment during the second half of the 1600s and the first half of the 1700s. The lack of association between the dynamics of FC and the dates of village establishments, and the significant association between large fire years and the early and latewood pine chronologies, used as historic drought proxy, indirectly suggests that the climate was the primary control of the landscape-level FCs in the studied forests. Pine-dominated forests of the Komi Republic may hold a unique position as the ecosystem with the shortest history of human-related shifts in fire cycles across the European boreal region.

Abstract Fire regimes in North American forests are diverse and modern fire records are often too short to capture important patterns, trends, feedbacks, and drivers of variability. Tree-ring fire scars provide valuable perspectives on fire regimes, including centuries-long records of fire year, season, frequency, severity, and size. Here, we introduce the newly compiled North American tree-ring fire-scar network (NAFSN), which contains 2562 sites, >37,000 fire-scarred trees, and covers large parts of North America. We investigate the NAFSN in terms of geography, sample depth, vegetation, topography, climate, and human land use. Fire scars are found in most ecoregions, from boreal forests in northern Alaska and Canada to subtropical forests in southern Florida and Mexico. The network includes 91 tree species, but is dominated by gymnosperms in the genus Pinus. Fire scars are found from sea level to >4000-m elevation and across a range of topographic settings that vary by ecoregion. Multiple regions are densely sampled (e.g., >1000 fire-scarred trees), enabling new spatial analyses such as reconstructions of area burned. To demonstrate the potential of the network, we compared the climate space of the NAFSN to those of modern fires and forests; the NAFSN spans a climate space largely representative of the forested areas in North America, with notable gaps in warmer tropical climates. Modern fires are burning in similar climate spaces as historical fires, but disproportionately in warmer regions compared to the historical record, possibly related to under-sampling of warm subtropical forests or supporting observations of changing fire regimes. The historical influence of Indigenous and non-Indigenous human land use on fire regimes varies in space and time. A 20th century fire deficit associated with human activities is evident in many regions, yet fire regimes characterized by frequent surface fires are still active in some areas (e.g., Mexico and the southeastern United States). These analyses provide a foundation and framework for future studies using the hundreds of thousands of annually- to sub-annually-resolved tree-ring records of fire spanning centuries, which will further advance our understanding of the interactions among fire, climate, topography, vegetation, and humans across North America.

Purpose Mycorrhizal fungi are critical for the growth and survival of trees although the knowledge on the extent of their association with different tree species in the boreal forest remains limited. Methods We examined the vertical distribution and composition of the root mycorrhizal communities of black spruce (Picea mariana (Mill.) B.S.P) and trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides Michx) along three soil layers (organic, minerals top 0–15 cm and bottom 15–30 cm) in pure and mixed stands, using next generation sequencing. Results We found that spruce and aspen differ in the composition of their mycorrhizal communities in respective pure stands. The difference was present also in mixed stands, despite a shift in the composition of species-specific mycorrhizal communities between pure and mixed stands. In mixed stands, the relative abundance of spruce-specialist mycorrhizae in the organic layer was higher than that of aspen-specialists. The opposite pattern was observed in the mineral soil. The mixed stands exhibited lower richness and abundance of generalist mycorrhizae in the organic and in the mineral soil layers. Conclusion The results suggest that it is the soil chemistry that structure species-specific mycorrhizal communities between pure stands and along different soil depth within stands. However, in mixed stands, it is the identity of tree species that determines the structure of mycorrhizae communities within soil layers. We speculate that the differences in the richness and abundance of individual mycorrhizal communities of spruce and aspen along the soil profile would likely contribute to stronger partitioning of tree nutrient uptake between these two species in mixed stands.

Increasing air temperatures and changing precipitation patterns due to climate change can affect tree growth in boreal forests. Periodic insect outbreaks affect the growth trajectory of trees, making it difficult to quantify the climate signal in growth dynamics at scales longer than a year. We studied climate-driven growth trends and the influence of spruce budworm (Choristoneura fumiferana Clem.) outbreaks on these trends by analyzing the basal area increment (BAI) of 2058 trees of Abies balsamea (L.) Mill., Picea glauca (Moench) Voss, Thuja occidentalis L., Populus tremuloides Michx., and Betula papyrifera Marsh, which co-occurs in the boreal mixedwood forests of western Quebec. We used a generalized additive mixed model (GAMM) to analyze species-specific trends in BAI dynamics from 1967 to 1991. The model relied on tree size, cambial age, degree of spruce budworm defoliation, and seasonal climatic variables. Overall, we observed a decreasing growth rate of the spruce budworm host species, A. balsamea and P. glauca between 1967 and 1991, and an increasing growth rate for the non-host, P. tremuloides, B. papyrifera, and T. occidentalis. Our results suggest that insect outbreaks may offset growth increases resulting from a warmer climate. The observation warrants the inclusion of the spruce budworm defoliation into models predicting future forest productivity.

Dendrochronological reconstructions inform us about historical climate-fire-human interactions, providing a means to calibrate projections of future fire hazard. Most of these reconstructions, however, have been developed in landscapes with a considerable proportion of xeric sites that could potentially inflate our estimates of the historic levels of fire activity. We provide a 420-year long reconstruction of fires in a mire-dominated landscape of the Veps Nature Park, North-West Russia. The area has mostly escaped large-scale forestry operations in the past and is an example of pristine mid-boreal vegetation with a high (approximately 30% for the area studied) proportion of waterlogged areas with ombrotropic mires. The historical fire cycle was 91.4 years (90% confidence intervals, CI 66.2–137.6 years) over the 1580–1720 period, decreasing to 35.9 (CI 28.1–47.6 years) between 1730 and 1770, and then increasing again to 122.7 years (CI 91.0–178.0 years) over the 1780–2000 period. Early season fires dominated over late season fires during the reconstruction period. We documented a higher fire activity period between 1730 and 1780, resulting from the increase in early season fires. This period coincided with one of the largest multi-decadal declines in the reconstructed spring precipitation since 1600 CE, although we found no significant relationship between fire and precipitation over the whole reconstructed period. The nine largest fire years were associated with negative summer precipitation and positive summer temperature anomalies over the study region. Land-use history of the area did not appear to have an effect on historical fire dynamics. Modern (1996–2016) fire records indicate a regional fire cycle of ∼ 1300 years, featuring a pronounced pattern with early (April–May) and late (July–September) season fires. The uniform fire cycle in the area since 1780, occurrence of nine largest fire years during years with spring-summer droughts, and low ignition frequencies over the last 420 years (0.005 to 0.037 ignitions per year and km2) suggest that the fire regime of the Veps Highland remained largely natural until the onset of the 20th century.

Understanding factors driving fire activity helps reveal the degree and geographical variability in the resilience of boreal vegetation to large scale climate forces. We studied the association between sea ice cover in the Baffin Bay and the Labrador Sea and observational records of forest fires in two Nordic countries (Norway and Sweden) over 1913–2017. We found a positive correlation between ice proxies and regional fire activity records suggesting that the Arctic climate and the associated changes in North Atlantic circulation exercise an important control on the levels of fire activity in Scandinavia. Changes in the sea cover are likely correlated with the dynamic of the North Atlantic Current. These dynamics may favor the development of the drought conditions in Scandinavia through promoting persistent high-pressure systems over the Scandinavian boreal zone during the spring and summer. These periods are, in turn, associated with an increased water deficit in forest fuels, leading to a regionally increased fire hazard. The Arctic climate will likely be an important future control of the boreal fire activity in the Nordic region.