Research progress on fire history reconstruction and its implications for climate change and human activities

Fire plays an paroxysmal-driving role in the earth ecosystem, and is of great significance in the evolution of human civilization. This review has roundly summarized the principles, methods and achievements of fire history reconstruction in a global scale, taking biofuel imcomplete combustion remains as proxies, which include charcoal, black carbon, tree-ring fire scar, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and levoglucosan. In general, on the time scale, charcoal, black carbon and levoglucosan are mostly used as proxies of millennial-scale fire history or longer, tree-ring fire scar is often used for reconstructing forest fire history, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are usually used for reconstructing the fire usage history in human production and living after the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago, which demonstrate the quick increasing in human population and rapid development of the social economy. These proxies are compared, and their complexity analyzed in this paper. Fire have close affinities with processes of rapid climate change and wet-dry level of climate, while in the Holocene, they are closely related to human activities of producing and living. In the future research, efforts should be made to reduce the uncertainty of fire history reconstruction. Meanwhile, the relationship between fire history and human activities needs further research.