Donna Hawthorne

University of St Andrews · Department of Geography and Sustainable Development

Globally, in recent years there has been an increase in the scale, intensity and level of destruction caused by wildfires. This can be seen in Ireland where significant changes in vegetation, land use, agriculture and policy, have promoted an increase in fires in the Irish landscape. This study looks at wildfire throughout the Holocene and draws on...

Progresses in reconstructing Earth's history of biomass burning has motivated the development of a modern charcoal dataset covering the last decades through a community-based initiative called the Global Modern Charcoal Dataset (GMCD). As the frequency, intensity and spatial scale of fires are predicted to increase regionally and globally in conjun...

In recent years a number of studies have suggested that trends in wildfire can be seen at a regional, national and global scale, and can be explained by interactions with factors such as anthropogenic activity and climate. As future susceptibility to fire is expected to be high it is important to understand such interactions and drivers of fire to...

Pits are commonplace in the Neolithic landscape of Scotland, and can be found in a variety of locations, usually associated with other features or more rarely as an isolated instance. They also vary in their contents, with some containing hoards, flint tools, lithics, pottery, plant remains, charcoal, human bone and other macrofossils. The variatio...

Background The global human footprint has fundamentally altered wildfire regimes, creating serious consequences for human health, biodiversity, and climate. However, it remains difficult to project how long-term interactions among land use, management, and climate change will affect fire behavior, representing a key knowledge gap for sustainable ma...

Peatlands of the central Congo Basin have accumulated carbon over millennia. They currently store some 29 billion tonnes of carbon in peat. However, our understanding of the controls on peat carbon accumulation and loss and the vulnerability of this stored carbon to climate change is in its infancy. Here we present a new model of tropical peatland...

La Cuvette centrale est le plus vaste complexe de tourbières tropicales au monde, qui s'étend sur environ 145 000 km2 en République du Congo et en République démocratique du Congo. Ce complexe stocke environ 30,6 Pg C, soit l'équivalent de trois années d'émissions mondiales de dioxyde de carbone, et représente désormais le premier site Ramsar trans...

Human activity has fundamentally altered wildfire on Earth, creating serious consequences for human health, global biodiversity, and climate change. However, it remains difficult to predict fire interactions with land use, management, and climate change, representing a serious knowledge gap and vulnerability. We used expert assessment to combine op...

The forested swamps of the central Congo Basin store approximately 30 billion metric tonnes of carbon in peat1,2. Little is known about the vulnerability of these carbon stocks. Here we investigate this vulnerability using peat cores from a large interfluvial basin in the Republic of the Congo and palaeoenvironmental methods. We find that peat accu...

Tropical peatlands are a globally important carbon store. They host significant biodiversity and provide a range of other important ecosystem services, including food and medicines for local communities. Tropical peatlands are increasingly modified by humans in the rapid and transformative way typical of the “Anthropocene,” with the most significan...

The status of tropical peatlands, one of Earth’s most efficient natural carbon stores, is of increasing international concern as they experience rising threat from deforestation and drainage. Peatlands form over thousands of years, where waterlogged conditions result in accumulation of organic matter. Vast areas of Southeast Asian peatlands have be...

The Cuvette Centrale is the largest tropical peatland complex in the world, covering approximately 145,000 km2 across the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It stores ca. 30.6 Pg C, the equivalent of three years of global carbon dioxide emis- sions and is now the first trans-natio- nal Ramsar site. Despite its size and importan...

Modern pollen studies are valuable for the calibration of pollen records and contribute to the understanding of past vegetation dynamics. Here, we present a qualitative review of available published and (where possible) unpublished modern pollen studies conducted in tropical Africa since pollen analysis emerged as a discipline in the early 20th cen...

Climate change is allowing fire to expand into previously unburnt ecosystems and regions. While management policies such as fire suppression have significantly altered their frequency and intensity. To prevent future biodiversity/ecosystem services loss, and the large financial burden of wildfires, management plans will be required to adapt to futu...

The world's most extensive tropical peatlands occur in the Cuvette Centrale depression in the Congo Basin, which stores 30.6 petagrams of carbon (95% CI, 6.3-46.8). Improving our understanding of the genesis, development and functioning of these under-studied peatlands requires knowledge of their topography and, in particular, whether the peat surf...

This Policy Brief results from a workshop held at Royal Holloway University of London and funded by PAGES, the Quaternary Research Association (QRA), and Chrono-environnement CNRS/Université de Franche-Comté. The workshop gathered 30 international participants from 15 countries to discuss ongoing challenges on biodiversity conservation and fire pol...

Global Paleofire Working Group 2: Diverse Knowledge Systems for Fire Policy and Biodiversity Conservation; Egham, United Kingdom, 4–9 September 2018

Human remains uncovered across Atlantic Scotland have displayed a variety of burial rites practised throughout the Iron Age. An excavation on the island of Islay, as part of the Historic Environment Scotland Human Remains Call-Off Contract, has uncovered a crouched inhumation eroding out of sand dunes near the western shore of Loch Gruinart. Osteol...

Volume 5 contains 20 chapters devoted to advances in field and laboratory research about coal and peat fires. Additional material about these fires is available on the companion website for this book at https://www.elsevier.com/books/coal-and-peat-fires-a-global-perspective/stracher/978-0-12-849885-9. Chapter 1 discusses the earliest known uses of...

Pits are commonplace in the Neolithic landscape of Scotland, and can be found in a variety of locations, usually associated with other features or more rarely as an isolated instance. They also vary in their contents, with some containing hoards, flint tools, lithics, pottery, plant remains, charcoal, human bone and other macrofossils. The variatio...