Prehistoric fire records developed from tree rings and from charcoal in lake sediments are being made available free on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Web site at www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/impd/.

The International Multiproxy Paleofire Database, a cooperative effort between those who reconstruct proxy records of past fire events from tree-ring and lake sediment charcoal evidence, grew out of a 2002 Tucson workshop.

Having historical data available in one bucket will allow forest and land managers to connect paleodata to modern data. U.S. Forest Service managers, for example, could have Web access to maps of past fires as well as modern ones.

“Recent record-breaking fires have led to an increased interest in understanding fire ecology and fire history in different forest types, as well as understanding how climate variations contribute to fire occurrence and severity,” said Andrea Brunelle, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Utah.

Fire histories that exceed the length of documentary records are especially critical in understanding changes in forest conditions and wildland fuel complexes resulting from a century of fire suppression. Long-term fire histories also provide land managers the opportunity to evaluate pre-European fire regimes when making fire regime condition class determinations, which likely would result in more accurate estimations, Brunelle said.

“A historical perspective on fire regimes and fuel structures provides not only guidance for restoration or reduction to more sustainable conditions, but, perhaps more importantly, also justification for such efforts to present to the public and policy-makers,” Brunelle said.

Organizers hope researchers will be willing to help seed the database with data from published papers.

While IMPD is less than a year old, 146 tree-ring records and four lake sediment records have been submitted already. Backers hope to add another 25 charcoal-based records soon, once permission is obtained from the researchers involved.

In the end, the database could include more than 450 tree-ring and at least 50 sediment-based records from papers published in the North American literature.

The greatest obstacle is just encouraging people to submit their published data, said University of Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research Director Thomas Swetnam.

“I believe 99.9% of fire research is funded with public money,” Swetnam said. “Researchers need to have the ethic that once they have published, they should submit their data so it is available to the public.”

Some prominent scientific journals, including Science and Nature, already require their authors to make their raw data publicly available on the Internet, either on the journals' own sites or on sites like IMPD.

Users are invited to assist in this effort by providing feedback such as data fields they would like to see, interface changes and informational summaries. Contact any of the board members listed on the Web site.