Search results for "fire"
showing 10 items of 463 documents
Broadleaf deciduous forest counterbalanced the direct effect of climate on Holocene fire regime in hemiboreal/boreal region (NE Europe)
2017
Abstract Disturbances by fire are essential for the functioning of boreal/hemiboreal forests, but knowledge of long-term fire regime dynamics is limited. We analysed macrocharcoal morphologies and pollen of a sediment record from Lake Lielais Svētiņu (eastern Latvia), and in conjunction with fire traits analysis present the first record of Holocene variability in fire regime, fuel sources and fire types in boreal forests of the Baltic region. We found a phase of moderate to high fire activity during the cool and moist early (mean fire return interval; mFRI of ∼280 years; 11,700–7500 cal yr BP) and the late (mFRI of ∼190 years; 4500–0 cal yr BP) Holocene and low fire activity (mFRI of ∼630 y…
Fires at Neumark-Nord 2, Germany: An analysis of fire proxies from a Last Interglacial Middle Palaeolithic basin site
2016
Few sites with evidence for fire use are known from the Last Interglacial in Europe. Hearth features are rarely preserved, probably as a result of post-depositional processes. The small postglacial basins (
Dead wood gathering among Neanderthal groups: Charcoal evidence from Abric del Pastor and El Salt (Eastern Iberia)
2017
International audience; We present here a new approach combining the microscopic characterization of fungal decay features and the fragmentation degree of the charcoal remains from Middle Palaeolithic combustion structures: features H4 and H11 from Abric del Pastor, unit IV (>75 ka BP) and features H50 and H57 from El Salt, unit Xb (ca. 52 ka BP), Eastern Iberia. The observation of wood degradation patterns that occurred prior to charring followed by their quantitative analysis according to previous experimental studies revealed differences between the alteration degrees of the firewood used in the hearths, highlighting the existence of firewood acquisition criteria based on dead wood gathe…
Climate, environment and human behaviour in the Middle Palaeolithic of Abrigo de la Quebrada (Valencia, Spain): The evidence from charred plant and m…
2019
Abstract The Abrigo de la Quebrada rock shelter was occupied by Neanderthal groups during the early Upper Pleistocene, yielding evidence for their subsistence practices and local resource exploitation. This paper focuses on the plant macroremains and the micromammals, which provide information about occupation patterns, the surrounding landscape, the use of resources, and the environment. Mountain pine forests and permanent grass formations containing humid zones and open spaces that would have harboured an eurythermal microfauna were the dominant landscape type. Cold-climate pines provided most of the firewood. The data are consistent with a recurrent, seasonal occupation pattern, in which…
The Anthropogenic Use of Firewood During the European Middle Pleistocene: Charcoal Evidence from Levels XIII and XI of Bolomor Cave, Eastern Iberia (…
2017
Human control of fire is a widely debated issue in the field of Palaeolithic archaeology, since it involved significant technological innovations for human subsistence. Although fire evidence has been the subject of intense debate regarding its natural or anthropogenic nature, most authors agree that combustion structures represent the most direct evidence of human control of fire. Wood charcoal fragments from these contexts represent the fuel remains that result from humans' collection of firewood, which means they can reveal significant behavioural and palaeoenvironmental information relevant to our understanding of Middle Palaeolithic societies. In this work, we present anthracological d…
New data about the landscape of the first occupation of Mallorca: Coval Simó (Escorca, Mallorca)
2020
The Coval Simó shelter provides some of the oldest evidence for settlement on the island of Mallorca and the Balearic archipelago. It also has the peculiarity of being a habitat in a mountain area, so that the human groups that settled there had to adapt their agricultural and farming system to this environment. The plant remains (wood charcoal and seeds) recovered in the occupation levels allow us to address these issues, since they are the result of the different activities developed in this cavity: fuel for domestic activities, food for livestock, etc. The results of this study show that between the III and II millennium cal BC, an agricultural system based on livestock and cereal farmi…
Current Wildland Fire Patterns and Challenges in Europe: A Synthesis of National Perspectives
2021
Changes in climate, land use, and land management impact the occurrence and severity of wildland fires in many parts of the world. This is particularly evident in Europe, where ongoing changes in land use have strongly modified fire patterns over the last decades. Although satellite data by the European Forest Fire Information System provide large-scale wildland fire statistics across European countries, there is still a crucial need to collect and summarize in-depth local analysis and understanding of the wildland fire condition and associated challenges across Europe. This article aims to provide a general overview of the current wildland fire patterns and challenges as perceived by natio…
From the roots to the stem: unveiling pear root colonization and infection pathways by Erwinia amylovora
2020
ABSTRACT Fire blight caused by Erwinia amylovora affects pome fruit worldwide, generating serious economic losses. Despite the abundant literature on E. amylovora infection mechanisms of aerial plant organs, root infection routes remain virtually unexplored. Assessing these infection pathways is necessary for a full understanding of the pathogen's ecology. Using the pathosystem Pyrus communis–E. amylovora and different experimental approaches including a green fluorescent protein transformant (GFP1) and epifluorescence microscopy (EFM) and laser confocal scanning microscopy (LCSM), we demonstrated the pathogen's ability to infect, colonize and invade pear roots and cause characteristic fire…
The specific role of plastidial glycolysis in photosynthetic and heterotrophic cells under scrutiny through the study of glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate d…
2016
The cellular compartmentalization of metabolic processes is an important feature in plants where the same pathways could be simultaneously active in different compartments. Plant glycolysis occurs in the cytosol and plastids of green and non-green cells in which the requirements of energy and precursors may be completely different. Because of this, the relevance of plastidial glycolysis could be very different depending on the cell type. In the associated study, we investigated the function of plastidial glycolysis in photosynthetic and heterotrophic cells by specifically driving the expression of plastidial glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPCp) in a glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate de…
Strong signature of selection in seeder populations but not in resprouters of the fynbos heathErica coccinea(Ericaceae)
2016
A higher frequency of natural selection is expected in populations of organisms with shorter generation times. In fire-prone ecosystems, populations of seeder plants behave as functionally semelparous populations, with short generation times compared to populations of resprouter plants, which are truly iteroparous. Therefore, a stronger signature of natural selection should be detected in seeder populations, favoured by their shorter generation times and higher rates of population turnover. Here we test this idea in Erica coccinea from the Cape Floristic Region, which is dimorphic for post-fire regeneration mode. We measured three floral traits supposedly subject to natural selection in see…