Northern New Mexico Fire Graphs

How to read these fire graphs:

Each long horizontal line represents one tree
Each short vertical mark represents a crossdated fire scar
The composite chronology at bottom shows vertical lines for years with at least two trees recording a fire scar
The "Prior to 1900" number is average time interval between composite fires

El Malpais Mesita fire graph

These two fire graphs are quite different from the others of the Southwest:

Fire frequency since 1900 is about the same as it was prior to 1900
The reason for this is important and is explained in this article
- Grissino-Meyer, H.D. and T.W. Swetnam. 1997. Multi-century history of wildfire in the ponderosa pine forests of El Malpais National Monument. New Mexico Bureau of Mines & Mineral Resources 156:163-172. This paper describes the past and current fire patterns of sites within the lava flows of El Malpais, the badlands of New Mexico. (1.3-Mb pdf file, password protected)