In 2005-2006, while doing a post-doc in the Geography Department at PennState, I was involved in a Joint Fire Science Program project that looked at Fire-Climate Interactions along North America’s Pacific Coast.  Alan Taylor, Andrew Carleton (both PennState), and Carl Skinner (Pacific Southwest Research Station) were PIs on the project.  We developed a network of tree-ring based fire regime reconstructions for northern California (Taylor et al. 2008) and combined it with data from southern Oregon and southern California.  We looked at the influence of atmospheric circulation patterns on past and present fire regimes and found that the Pacific North American (PNA) pattern is a main driver of fire occurrence and spread in the region (Trouet et al. 2006, 2009).

The fire reconstruction network we developed for California and Oregon is unique and provides research opportunities galore.  We continue to analyze the network to disentangle the influence of climate and humans on fire regimes in the region.  In a recent paper, we have used the network to compare northern Californian fire regimes with those in other regions in the American West over the period 1400-1900 (Trouet et al. 2010).