Sedimentary Charcoal: What Can We Infer from the Archives?

Sedimentary charcoal has been used to reconstruct past fire for over 80 years, but as we try to answer more nuanced questions about the complex interactions between fire, climate, vegetation, and human management, we need tools that can reconstruct specific aspects of past fire regimes. Here, we focus on recent advances in fire intensity reconstruction from sedimentary charcoal, with emphasis on optical reflectance, spectrographic, and geochemical methods. We summarize their origin and basis, before discussing next steps in development to maximize their utility and research impact.