A new article in Quaternary Science Reviews provides climate data for northwest Québec over the past 4,000 years. The study’s authors trace the vegetation and fire history of the region using pollen and charcoal from terrestrial and lacustrine sediment cores, showing fluctuations corresponding to general hemispheric trends. On the local level their findings show that cooling during the Holocene contributed to deforestation by limiting vegetative reproduction of spruce trees, so that when a fire cleared out the trees in area they could not bounce back. On a theoretical level, this study offers a method for reconstructing local differences within regional vegetation and climate histories. Read the full article here.
Climate History Network