Douglas J. Hallett

Douglas J. Hallett
University of Calgary · Biogeoscience Institute

Ph.D.

About

26
Publications
9,750
Reads
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3,256
Citations
Additional affiliations
April 2002 - June 2005
Northern Arizona University
Position
  • NSERC Postdoctoral Researcher
July 2005 - July 2008
Queen's University
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
September 1996 - February 2002
Simon Fraser University
Position
  • Ph.D. Graduate Student

Publications

Publications (26)
Article
Full-text available
The significance and cause of the decline in biomass burning across the Americas after AD 1500 is a topic of considerable debate. We synthesized charcoal records (a proxy for biomass burning) from the Americas and from the remainder of the globe over the past 2000 years, and compared these with paleoclimatic records and population reconstructions....
Article
Full-text available
1] Climate is an important control on biomass burning, but the sensitivity of fire to changes in temperature and moisture balance has not been quantified. We analyze sedimentary charcoal records to show that the changes in fire regime over the past 21,000 yrs are predictable from changes in regional climates. Analyses of paleo-fire data show that f...
Article
Full-text available
Understanding the causes and consequences of wildfires in forests of the western United States requires integrated information about fire, climate changes, and human activity on multiple temporal scales. We use sedimentary charcoal accumulation rates to construct long-term variations in fire during the past 3,000 y in the American West and compare...
Article
Full-text available
Here, we present two high-resolution records of macroscopic charcoal from high-elevation lake sites in the Sierra Nevada, California, and evaluate the synchroneity of fire response for east- and west-side subalpine forests during the past 9200 yr. Charcoal influx was low between 11,200 and 8000 cal yr BP when vegetation consisted of sparse Pinus-do...
Article
Full-text available
Over the past several decades, high-resolution sediment–charcoal records have been increasingly used to reconstruct local fire history. Data analysis methods usually involve a decomposition that detrends a charcoal series and then applies a threshold value to isolate individual peaks, which are interpreted as fire episodes. Despite the proliferatio...
Article
Full-text available
Giant sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum [Lindl.] J. Buchholz) preserve a detailed history of fire within their annual rings. We developed a 3000 year chronology of fire events in one of the largest extant groves of ancient giant sequoias, the Giant Forest, by sampling and tree-ring dating fire scars and other fire-related indicators from 52 trees...
Article
Wildfire is an ecological disturbance that plays a role in ecosystem function and is complexly associated with climate and vegetation. The study of long-term fire regimes can provide information about the range of conditions that have existed in an environment and supply context for future shifts in those conditions. There has been little research...
Article
Full-text available
Fire activity has varied globally and continuously since the last glacial maximum (LGM) in response to long-term changes in global climate and shorter-term regional changes in climate, vegetation, and human land use. We have synthesized sedimentary charcoal records of biomass burning since the LGM and present global maps showing changes in fire act...
Article
Full-text available
An accurate assessment of historical local Holocene data is important in making future climate predictions. Holocene climate is often obtained through proxy measures such as diatoms or pollen using radiocarbon dating. Wiggle Match Dating (WMD) uses an iterative least squares approach to tune a core with a large amount of 14C dates to the 14C calibr...
Article
Millennial-scale records of forest fire provide important baseline information for ecosystem management, especially in regions with too few recent fires to describe the historical range of variability. Charcoal records from lake sediments and soil profiles are well suited for reconstructing the incidence of past fire and its relationship to changin...
Article
Full-text available
Several studies have noted a relationship between vegetation type and fire frequency, yet despite the importance of ecosystem processes such as fire the long-term relationships between disturbance, climate and vegetation type are incompletely understood. We analysed pollen, plant macrofossils and sedimentary charcoal from three lakes within the Ken...
Article
Full-text available
The environmental history of the Kootenay Valley in the southern Canadian Rockies was reconstructed using lake sediment from Dog Lake, British Columbia, and compared to other paleoenvironmental studies in the region to understand how vegetation dynamics and fire regimes responded to climate change during the Holocene. A pollen-based vegetation reco...
Article
Full-text available
The Marpole phase of the Gulf of Georgia, SW British Columbia (2400-1200 cal B.P.) is recognized by many archaeologists as a significant period of culture change. Concurrent with this cultural phase is a climatic regime characterized by a substantial increase in forest fires associated with persistent summer drought: the Fraser Valley Fire Period (...
Chapter
Full-text available
Ethnographic sources document the importance of prescribed burning practices among hunter-gatherers worldwide (e.g., Mills 1986; Pyne 1993). On the Northwest Coast, scattered references indicate that prescribed burning was widespread at the time of European contact and in the early historic era (e.g., Boyd 1986; Gottesfeld 1994a; Norton 1979b; Turn...
Article
Full-text available
To investigate postglacial environmental changes in both the coastal and interior wet belts of British Columbia, fossil midges were analysed from two subalpine lakes, one adjacent to the lower Fraser canyon (Frozen Lake), and the other in Mount Revelstoke National Park (Eagle Lake). The midge stratigraphy for Frozen Lake revealed an abundance of rh...
Article
To investigate postglacial environmental changes in both the coastal and interior wet belts of British Columbia, fossil midges were analysed from two subalpine lakes, one adjacent to the lower Fraser canyon (Frozen Lake), and the other in Mount Revelstoke National Park (Eagle Lake). The midge stratigraphy for Frozen Lake revealed an abundance of rh...
Article
Full-text available
High-resolution charcoal analysis of lake sediments and stand-age information were used to recon-struct a 1000-year re history around Dog Lake, which is located in the montane spruce zone of southeastern British Columbia. Macroscopic charcoal (>125 mm) accumulation rates (CHAR) from lake sediment were compared with a modern stand-origin map and re-...
Article
Full-text available
Little is known about the role of fire in the mountain hemlock (Tsuga mertensiana (Bong.) Carrière) rain forests of southern British Columbia. High-resolution analysis of macroscopic charcoal from lake sediment cores, along with 102 accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) ages on soil charcoal, was used to reconstruct the long-term fire history around...
Article
Full-text available
"Coastal temperate rainforests from southeast Alaska through to southern Oregon are ecologically distinct from forests of neighboring regions, which have a drier, or more continental, climate and disturbance regimes dominated by fires. The long-term role of fire remains one of the key outstanding sources of uncertainty in the historical dynamics of...
Article
A Glacier Peak tephra has been found in the mid-Holocene sediment records of two subalpine lakes, Frozen Lake in the southern Coast Mountains and Mount Barr Cirque Lake in the North Cascade Mountains of British Columbia, Canada. The age–depth relationship for each lake suggests an age of 5000–5080 14C yr B.P. (5500–5900 cal yr B.P.) for the eruptio...
Article
Full-text available
High-resolution analysis of macroscopic charcoal and pollen ratios were used to reconstruct a 10,000 yr history of fire and vegetation change around Dog Lake, now in the Montane Spruce biogeoclimatic zone of southeastern British Columbia. Lake sediment charcoal records suggest that fire was more frequent in the early Holocene from 10,000 to 8200 ca...
Article
Full-text available
Charcoal fragments recovered from the Mazama air-all tephra layer in cores from Dog and Cobb lakes, Kootenay National Park, British Columbia, yielded accelerator mass spectrometry ages of 6720 +/- 70 and 6760 +/- 70 C-14 years BP, respectively. These two new ages, together with other previously published radiocarbon ages on charcoal and twig fragme...
Article
"September 1996". Thesis: (M.E.Des.-Environmental Science) -- The University of Calgary, 1996. Includes bibliographical references.

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